Seven Lives of Dinah Ash, 2019

"This bildungsroman is about the search for and the meaning of identity, about the essence of culture, and, as any human pursuit, about love and death. Dinah Ash is a Russian Jewish ballerina, who grows up in the late Soviet Union and moves to the U.S. to escape the rising tide of antisemitism as her civilization is collapsing. Having lost her fiancé to the Afghanistan war and her grandmother to lymphoma, she is alone in a strange land, soon to discover she is losing ballet, too, to Chernobyl-caused lung cancer. This novel is her journey through happiness and love and loss; immigration, nostalgia, and culture shock; the torturously slow comprehension of her own Jewishness; her struggle with the concepts of religion and family and of home, finally finding all three where she would not have thought to look: in a small synagogue, in a small American town." -- Abstract