Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

March 31, 2008
The third book from Vapnyar (following There Are Jews in My House
and Memoirs of a Muse
) links food to lonely, loveless dating among recent Russian immigrants over six tales. The opening “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf” follows endearingly scatterbrained Nina, whose penchant for letting vegetables wilt in the fridge comes to symbolize her marriage. The warm, awkward “Borscht” centers on the monastic Sergey, who splurges on an “affordable” prostitute and finds the transaction doesn't go as planned. In “Luda and Milena,” the two titular elderly women try to outcook each other to win the affections of Aron, the 79-year-old widower who is the prize single man of their ESL program. Vapnyar, who emigrated from Russia in 1994, draws the humor from her characters' pretensions and predicaments, but also finds a great pathos in their quiet—and not so quiet—desperation. She ends the collection with a blog-voiced roundup of recipes that's incongruent with the delicate stories, but her take on the poignant oddities of New York Russian émigré life is universally palatable.

May 1, 2008
This collection by Vapnyar ("Memoirs of a Muse") follows up her first collection, "There Are Jews in My House", which won the Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in 2004. Among the growing number of writers, including David Bezmozgis and Ellen Litman, who use eloquence and sardonic wit to capture the experience of Eastern European immigrants from the Communist bloc resettling in American cities, Vapnyar is one of the best. Her new collection, with its focus on food, captures the delights of abundantly packed grocery shelves and, conversely, the sadness associated with the makeshift recipes of home, like Salad Olivier, a creative assemblage consisting of items that were generally available even in hard times, including boiled potatoes, canned peas, and bologna. The thematic nature of the collection is also its downfall, unfortunately, and not owing to any lack in quality. The book feels thin and is over too fast, leaving the reader, perhaps appropriately, hungry for more. Recommended for urban public libraries.Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

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