Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

By Stewart Kampel for Hadassah Magazine

Readers often assume that a first novel is autobiographical. Especially in the case of Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Russian-born author of Panic in a Suitcase, since she shares roots in Odessa and Brighton Beach with her major characters. Akhtiorskaya, a 30-year-old who is a sly, no-holds-barred writer, explores the confounding life of émigrés from Russian-speaking Ukraine trying to build new lives in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa.

The book spans two periods. It begins in 1993 when Pasha Nasmertov, a well-known poet and the last family member in Odessa, leaves the motherland to go to Brooklyn to visit his mother, Esther, the 65-year-old family matriarch who is stricken with breast cancer. Fifteen years later, young Frida, the poet’s niece, on a short hiatus from medical school, flies to Odessa in search of herself, only to find a perplexing and vexing world.

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