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Unconventional Tales

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Readers bored with straightforward narration will be seduced by Emil Draitser's style of writing. The stories included in this volume are compelling, sometimes even startling. Draitser resorts to unconventional language and imagery. The realistic mingles with the figurative and the mystical in his prose. That very mix renders Draitser's writing original and fascinating.His stories offer profound insights into the human condition, yet they are not humorless. The underpinnings of subtle, acerbic wit add special flavor to the texts. Some stories are probing analyses of Russian immigrants' process of acculturation in the US; most are intriguing existential tales. This review is not a perfunctory hat-tipping to the author. While inevitably something is lost in translation, Draitser's stories are truly original and informed by a shrewd and unique vision of the world.

Belonging and Alienation

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I have been following Emil Draitser's career ever since he published his bilingual edition of Soviet underground jokes. This collection of 14 short stories is a more ambitious work that fully deserves a wider audience. The stories may vary in length, tone, content or point of view, but the author invariably tailors them to illuminate one or more aspects of the human condition. Whether he is masterfully depicting the poignant no-exit situation in Zugzwang, or the pathos of belonging and alienation in American Lady, or the precarious existence of the writer in the former Soviet Union in Faithful Masha, Mr. Draitser is always engaging. Highly recommended.

At Sea in a New Genre

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When you launch into "The Supervisor of the Sea," be prepared to leave behind your compass of familiar landmarks. In these haunting dreamlike tales, Emil Draitser has charted a new genre: Russian-American surrealism. This is a marriage of Ilf & Petrov's satire with Garcia Marquez' magical realism, filtered thru Andre Breton's sensibility making an honored guest of the unconscious. To boot, some stories take place in the Kafkaesque U.S.S.R., whose mystique cannot be shed by the mere expedient of emigration.
As a chess devotee, this reader zeroed in on the story "Zugzwang." This term in the royal game denotes a situation where one must move, but any move makes the position worse. Non-players may appreciate the feeling if absorbed in a Draitser tale and suddenly forced to evade a flood or an avalanche. Short of those, you will not want to put it down.
-Anthony Saidy