One-Way Ticket: Stories

By Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Zinik's one-way ticket took him from the Soviet Union to the West in 1975, and most of his characters have had a similar fate. "You sit with a cocktail at a cafe table and all this joyous, richly diverse world swirls about you. And you start to swirl with it" says one in a letter home to Moscow, and swirl is evident throughout these finely balanced stories. But so is the nostalgia, the restlessness, the lack of connection that so many emigres experience.

With a narrative style and humor that sometimes hints at Nabokov, Zinik (The Mushroom Picker, 1986, 1996), who left Russia in 1975, crafts amazing stories depicting the plight of emigres as they endure their solitude and try, ultimately, to create new lives and new selves. These eight stories give glimpses of the mindset and frustrations that the narrator (also named Zinovy Zinik) experiences.