Grjasnowa

Olga Grjasnowa

Olga Grjasnowa was born in 1984, in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR. Her parents were Russian Jews. Seven years later, in 1991, Azerbaijan declared its independence from the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. In 1996 her family moved to Germany as Kontingentflüchtlinge, so-called ‘quota refugees’. She completed her secondary education in Frankfurt am Main. She graduated from the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig (formerly the Johannes R. Becher Institute) in 2010. Her first novel, Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (2012), was translated into English by Eva Bacon under the title All Russians love birch trees (2014).

In March 2023 she was appointed Professor at the Universität für angewandte Kunst (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna.

She has written two other novels:

Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe (2014); The Legal Unclarity of a Marriage

Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017); literally ‘God is not shy’; translated as City of Jasmine (2019)

She has also published an essay on multilingualism:

Die Macht der Mehrsprachigkeit. Über Herkunft und Vielfalt (2021); The Power of Multilingualism: On Origin and Diversity

Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (2012)

All Russians love birch trees (2014)

The title of the novel alludes to a line from Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters. In Act One, Vershinin says: ‘Dear humble birches, I love them best of all trees.’ The novel is not about Russians, instead it is about young adults in contemporary Germany and Israel. It is also about how people with complex, diverse ethnic backgrounds often get categorised according to crude clichés.

The novel centres on a group of university students in Frankfurt am Main from diverse migrant family backgrounds. Only the first-person narrator, Maria ‘Mascha’ Kogan, is ‘Russian’, because she was born in the USSR, which ceased to exist when she was a child. Having spent her teenage years in Frankfurt, Mascha is studying for a double Masters degree in Interpreting and Arabic. She lives with her boyfriend Elias, a photography student who is the only son of East German parents. Mascha and her parents are Russian Jews who lived previously in Baku in Azerbaijan. Mascha’s early years were marked by the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1998-1994), caused by ethnic strife between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. As a child, during the Baku pogrom of 1990 against Armenians, Mascha witnessed a woman being killed beside her. She is haunted by the image of this dying woman, whose image recurs several times in the novel. Mascha seems to be suffering from a form of PTSD, and this is exacerbated when her boyfriend Elias is rushed into intensive care due to complications from a sports injury. Things go from bad to worse and Mascha blames herself – she has read somewhere that people with PTSD risk destroying the people they love (p. 150).

Mascha is supported through her crisis by her friends Cem and Sami, both pot-smoking PhD students. Sami (her ex-boyfriend) was born in Beirut, his mother is Lebanese and his father was Swiss. Cem is from a German-Turkish family. (Mascha’s father speaks Azeri, which is similar to Turkish, and so he can communicate easily with Cem).

In the second half of the novel, Mascha gets a job in Tel Aviv working as a translator/interpreter for a German political foundation. She visits Yad Vashem together with her aunt and her cousin; her own grandmother was a Holocaust survivor (pp. 192-93), who lived long enough to witness the ethnic violence in Baku in the early 1990s.

Mascha becomes friends with two young Israelis, a brother and sister called Ori and Tal. Tal is a left-wing political activist, with whom she has an affair. Mascha’s work as a translator takes her to Ramallah in the West Bank. There, she meets a Palestinian brother and sister, Ismael and Haifa, and hears their perspectives on the conflict.

Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt is very readable and it contains some great political satire, for example, when Cem describes his father’s disappointing visit to a CDU election meeting (pp. 136-37). Grjasnowa is at her best when depicting subtle forms of racism, for example, Mascha’s philosemitic German friend Daniel.

Implicitly, the novel calls for frank and respectful dialogue across cultures and ethnic groups. This is exemplified when Mascha and Cem see a black child playing on a beach, and Cem hopes that one day the kid will grow up to read and understand all the classic works of postcolonialism, racism studies, and critical whiteness studies, including those by Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Mark Terkessidis (p. 221).

English Translations

Olga Grjasnowa, All Russians love birch trees, trans. by Eva Bacon (New York: Other Press, 2014)

Olga Grjasnowa, City of Jasmine, trans. by Katy Derbyshire (London: OneWorld Publications, 2019)