For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors, by Laura Esther Wolfson
University of Iowa Press

Very few books are so dense or so intriguing they demand a second reading. Or even a third. Middlemarch possibly. Anna Karenina or Bleak House. Novels by W G Sebald possibly. For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors falls firmly into the re-read category. Deceptively dense, it is packed with layers of lightly told reflections on life.

The novel’s title channels a mode of weighty, even prolix wackiness — specifically linked to a faux-nostalgia for the vanished world of Soviet communism — Marina Lewycka’s A History of Tractor Drivers in the Ukraine must be the model. For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors is a metaphor for that oppressive quasi-utopian world, where the author found herself — by unexplained happenstance — married to a Russian in deepest rural Georgia. His mother is the redoubtable Nadezdha a matriarch survivor (her sister died of starvation in the Siege of Leningrad) determined to take over the upbringing of her first grandchild.

And, in this, Nadezdha succeeds, sidelining the quiet mother, Julia, who keeps working so hard, Soviet-style, she eventually loses contact with her own child.

Single train conductors (mothers of course) are examples of the kind of sacrifice — and deference to the Babushka — silently expected in that society. Little wonder that Laura Esther (named after a delightfully decadent aunt) Wolfson decides to decamp with her bewildered spouse to her native America. (Julia asks for her to leave her diaphragm “I’ll boil it in the big soup pot”.) It is a grim time for Laura and her émigré husband, “ the place we’d moved into — the tarnished sign in front said ‘Imperial Court’ – was less than an apartment building. Old women shuffled in the hallways, their fat feet packaged in brown paper secured with twine. Rent was due weekly, cash only.”

When a cockroach drops out of a book, the couple decide to leave and Laura realises the mysterious groups of glamorously kitted out people outside the apartment block she had avoided for 14 months, were Chasidim.

Although she had heard a few Yiddish words in her past, “this was the sum total of my knowledge about the Jews — of whom I was one”.

It nevertheless opens vistas on to memories of family stories never re-visited. Her father liked to tell a tale of how, as a ten-year-old, his own father insisted on fasting on Yom Kippur and passed out on a hard pew in Brooklyn (“He fainted! From hunger! On Yom Kippur! At ten in the morning! Roars of laughter invariably followed).

Laura Esther Wolfson’s book is a revelation of real Jewish identity as it unravels through her own life. She is compelling, the book wonderfully written: confessional, anguished, insightful, and I am just off to start it all over again.

Anne Garvey is a freelance journalist