Synopsis:
A bitter-witty novel about life as a Russian-Jewish emigrant in New York, the hunt for a lover, about art, sex and death, about strangers and homeland. A fast-paced and cheeky book by an author who has returned to where everyone dreams of apples, chickens and Pushkin: the Petersburg bohemian. Julia and her daughter Polina emigrated to the USA from Russia in the late 1980s on the run from an impending civil war. Initially, Julia does everything right: she works as an artist and marries a neat man. With him, she lives three years at the end of the world in Midwest Indiana, until she breaks out and returns to New York. There she leads a life as bohemians, free as in beloved Petersburg. Addicted to life and driven by the search for love—or at least sex—she also arranges with foreign status symbols such as regular work, family, car, or a pet named "boyfriend" or "girlfriend." She steps into every fat bowl and all her relationships fail - due to the narrowness of men and the bad luck that haunts her. When she is fed up with her situation, she decides to hire as a prostitute in an SM club. But even in this job, passion is out of place and soon she loses it again. She begins to drink and increasingly decays into depression. In short, she finds hold in religion and Russia, but again and again she gets entangled in unhappy affairs. After a survived serious illness, she returns to Petersburg. "Apple, Chicken and Pushkin" is a cheeky, permissive and fast autobiographical novel full of wisdom, marked by ironic and self-deprecating humor, Jewish wit and spirit. Again and again, Julia's thoughts circle around emigration, Judaism, religion, literature and love. Her thoughts are "applied, or directly implementable philosophy, packed into the intimate experiences of a young woman".
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