Half the stories in "The Last Chicken in America" revolve around a young woman, Masha, and her father and mother, Tolik and Lina, and their narratives accrue with touching emotional impact. In the opening title story, Masha, who is just out of high school, and her parents are initially hopeful about their new lives, energized by the "delirious, noble dream" of America, its brightness and plentitude. They wander the aisles of the Giant Eagle, stunned by the "earnest pinks and yellows and blues in the packaging."
In Moscow, Tolik was an engineer, Lina a literature teacher. Like the other characters in the book, they were a part of the intelligentsia. By no means, though, do they miss Russia, which they remember as "a cheerless place, punctured and cheated. The metro trains at rush hour, the lines in front of empty stores, the mobs of tired people, their faces like stone and loam." On top of economic hardships, they had faced discrimination; being Jewish in Russia had "meant classmates calling you names. It meant a line in your passport, schools that would never accept you, jobs you couldn't have. It meant leaflets and threats and a general on TV promising pogroms in May. It meant immigration."
Gamely they try to adjust to living in Pittsburgh. They take ESL classes and attend career-development workshops. They go to Burger King and figure out how to eat a sandwich: "You hold it with both hands, like this." Yet, despite their efforts, they languish in a state of underemployment. Masha's father never rises beyond a job as a laborer in a steelmaking facility, her mother as a nurse's aide in a retirement home. In between menial positions, they subsist on welfare and food stamps, battling bureaucratic Catch-22s. The best anyone in Squirrel Hill can hope for, it seems, is to study computers to secure a job at Mellon Bank.
