Thank god he did. Eleven years after arriving in America, Penkov has published one of the most exciting debut collections in recent memory. The eight stories contained in “East of West’’ are funny and sad and wonderfully natural. Their best heroes feel like Eastern European cousins to Quentin Compson, the genteel Southerner who washed up at Harvard in William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!,’’ a man inexorably tied to a place, but determined, for his own survival, to leave it.
In the end, Compson could never leave the South. The same can be said of Penkov’s characters and their Bulgaria. However aggressive Penkov’s young men and women are about getting green cards and emigrating to the West, their families tug even harder in the other direction.
Over and again in “East of West,’’ grandparents, parents, teachers, and aging aunts attempt to smuggle bits of family lore (and Bulgarian history) into the travel bags of the grandchildren. In one of the funniest such leave-takings, which takes place in “Buying Lenin,’’ a young man on his way to America is given a good-bye letter from his grandfather.
“ ‘You rotten capitalist pig,’ the note reads, ‘have a safe flight. Love, Grandpa.’ ’’ To which the young man scribbles back: “You communist dupe, thanks for the letter. I’m leaving tomorrow, and when I get there I’ll try to marry an American woman ASAP. I’ll be sure to have lots of American children. Love, your grandson.’’
The breach that communism - and its fall - opened between generations in Bulgaria is poignantly and hilariously probed here. “Makedonija,’’ the first story, tells of a man born 20 years after Bulgaria freed itself from Ottoman rule. He is living in a retirement village under Communist rule in 1969, adapting grumpily. Then he finds one of his wife’s old love letters.
