“Who we are” by Lena Gorelik: Likewise – culture

There is constant shame that catches up with the young girl. Shame that lurks in every corner of the refugee home. That has to do with the smell of frying fat, with mold, with the barbed wire fence that surrounds the home. Shame is the feeling of not having a presentable home to invite classmates to.

The feeling of being wrong, of not belonging. So Lena, the narrator, prefers to stutter around, always pointing out new streets where she supposedly lives. A refugee child with countless addresses.

When Lena Gorelik came to Germany with her family from St. Petersburg in 1992, she was eleven years old and her brother nine years older.

They are all Jewish “contingent refugees”, in their homeland Lena has repeatedly suffered from contemptuous comments about her Jewish origins.

Your new home is a refugee barracks in the Swabian town of Ludwigsburg, where 60 women and men live together in a small space and share a single shower. The family lives here for a year and a half before they can move into their own apartment. “We had nothing,” is the refrain, which the mother will later repeat like a prayer wheel. A refrain of poverty and neglect. The golden west is a land of shades of gray.

Subtle psychogram of a refugee family

With her autobiographical novel “Who we are”, Lena Gorelik, who was born in 1981, wrote a very personal book. Thoughtful, painful, stubborn, hopeful. “Who we are” is a touching coming-of-age story because the author has to grow up under precarious conditions.

Gorelik’s debut novel “Meine White Nights” (2004) had already addressed their grueling assimilation in a light, often humorous tone. The new novel, with a melancholy foundation, on the other hand, asks many questions, reveals itself as a subtle psychogram of a refugee family. A picture sheet without a continuous plot with ever new scenes and anecdotes, time leaps and changes of location. Some scenes suddenly tear off and only later are the loose threads picked up again.

A novel like a woven carpet that gradually takes shape. Just as the family is only gradually gaining a foothold in their new home, they never really feel at home.

Lena’s father, a qualified engineer by training, hires a temporary employment agency and moves from one factory to another. The mother, also an engineer, is retraining to become an accountant and has to go cleaning for a while.

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The grandmother, who once ran a textile factory, has difficulties with the foreign language and still believes “that her Yiddish sounds a little like Swabian”. Above all, there lurks the anxious question that nobody dares to answer: Was emigration the right decision, especially when you constantly have to feel like an outcast?

All the more pressure there is on Lena to “manage” to be successful so that the family investment is worthwhile. In fact, the girl who learns the foreign language in a short period of time is successful, skipping a class at school and is considered a nerd.

Later she was accepted at the journalism school in Munich. Lena, the high-flyer. So the roles are reversed in a foreign country, the parents sometimes become helpless children who are not understood with their bumpy German. Lena’s reaction? Pity.

A novel like a woven carpet

A poisoned feeling that she doesn’t want, but that keeps coming back to her like a boomerang. In the restaurant it is she who orders because she is the only one who speaks German without an accent. Years later, however, Lena will be the daughter her parents are concerned about, a young woman without a solid job who “only” writes books. How the daughter feels, what she dreams of, there is no room for that in the minds of the parents. Life dreams are a luxury. Their only compass is the pragmatism “what my parents call life.”

Lena Gorelik manages the balancing act of writing lovingly and sometimes blatantly distant about her parents without ever rising above them. There is the mother who floods the daughter with her love. Or the admonishing father who constantly annoys Lena with his question: “Now, what tasks are waiting for you?”

Or the grandmother who lost a son in Russia, is lonely abroad and at some point begins to forget things. Everyone experiences their new home in their own way, stores different memories. Is the granddaughter, the daughter, even allowed to write about her family, possibly hurt her? Lena Gorelik ponders about this, struggles with herself in order to “defiantly”, as she admits, write down “my story” in the end. So the novel is also an act of self absolution.

Language is a living being

But the real main character of this book is language. The author occasionally smuggles in Russian sentences and words, the first letter of the novel is Russian and means “I”. Russian, for the narrator, is the language of emotions, “Babushka”, grandmother, is for her “one of the most beautiful words in the world”.

Language is a living being that has to be conquered, that can be close and at the same time inaccessible. For Lena Gorelik, German has become the language in which she writes her books and in which her two sons are socialized. This is exactly what distinguishes them and their children: “We do not have a common mother tongue.” When she comforts her children, when she wants to be tender with them, she falls back into Russian.

“Who we are” is about uprooting and the effort to feel at home, about discrimination and the struggle for a new identity. The turmoil determines the sound of this touching book, in which Gorelik not only succeeds in creating unusual images, but also beautiful neologisms. If she describes, for example, how much she suffers from the feeling of exclusion: “I am not worthy of any kind.” The word would be worth a Duden entry.