A ‘Mannequin Girl’ yearning to be average

A coming-of-age volume explores Jewish identity and dissent in the final days of the Soviet Union.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
In mid-1980s Soviet Russia, dissidence is a handicap. (photo credit: REUTERS)
In mid-1980s Soviet Russia, dissidence is a handicap.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Just before she starts first grade in 1980, Kat Knopman-Roshdal, a local wunderkind, is diagnosed with scoliosis.
It is not the only “handicap” with which she must contend. Her parents, Anechka and Misha, who teach literature and theater at a Moscow school, are political dissidents in a country in which “you adapt by betraying your principles.” The Knopman-Roshdals are Jewish, moreover, “and some girls at school don’t make it sound like a good thing.”
In Mannequin Girl, Ellen Litman, the author of short story collection The Last Chicken in America, takes Kat through her nine years in a school-sanitarium for children with spinal ailments.
A coming-of-age novel, set in the last bleak days of the Soviet Union, Mannequin Girl has a sober and somber theme: Shedding her “wish to stand out, to be either a mannequin girl or a freak,” Kat wants only to be “normal, unnoticeable, average.”
Concerned principally with Kat’s evolving sense of self, Litman allows the plot of Mannequin Girl to unfold very slowly. She adeptly captures the murky and menacing political climate of the Soviet Union, by referring often to dissent and Jewish identity but refusing to pin down with specificity the impact of these allegiances on the lives of her subjects.
In the 1980s, she suggests, the Soviet Union was awash in rumors and threats. At Kat’s school there is much discussion of Pamyat, the patriotic group that extols Orthodox Christianity and blames Jews for everything that has gone wrong. Some of Kat’s teachers think it unnatural that there are so many Jewish academics, artists, and actors in the Soviet Union. And so for these reasons, among others, Nikita, Kat’s classmate, who heretofore had not made a distinction between Jews and non-Jews, “now feels that only a Jewish friend can understand what he’s been through.”
The jobs of Misha and Anechka, Kat learns, might be in jeopardy because of their views – and, in the mid-1980s, the couple drops its dissident activities. The movement no longer exists, Misha declares; journals have been shut down, dissidents imprisoned or exiled. Although no one can tell for sure, Kat’s grandfather is convinced that flyers, adorned with a cross and the slogan “Get rid of Yids. Keep our nation pure,” and pinned to the front door of his house, contributed to his wife’s fatal heart attack.
“I should have taken her to Israel,” he says. “She’d have lived to be 100 years old.”
In Kat, Litman has created a believable – and memorable – young girl, who is struggling to come to terms with her ambition, insecurity, loneliness, physical limitations, hormonal changes, and her mother and father’s deteriorating relationship. The other characters in the novel, Anechka and Misha, Kat’s friends Jules, Serge, and Nikita, and the teachers in the school, are less fully realized – and less interesting.
A rigorous editor, in my judgment, might have improved the novel. Litman has a tendency to characterize what she has just shown. We already know that Kat does not like visiting Misha’s mother, and that “she’d like nothing more than to be Nikita’s girl.” And, although Litman was born in Moscow, and may well be more conversant than I am about the idiomatic expressions of young Muscovites, her novel seems to be littered with Americanisms, some of them ill-suited to the 1980s.
Would seventh graders, one wonders, say that their classmates were doing “you know what,” or refer to a girl as “big with child,” a “normal broad,” or “well-endowed”? Would a teenager in the Soviet Union use the dismissive 21st-century terms “whatever” and “I get it” or describe a teacher as “certifiable”? All that said, Litman succeeds in drawing readers into Kat’s world, her volatile and at times adolescent relationships with her family and friends, her school and her thoughts, feelings and behavior.
Nonetheless, it seems to me, Litman will leave some readers scratching their heads at the scaled-down expectations Kat embraces at the end of the novel. Is she simply being rational, realistic and mature when she concludes “that being exceptional is nothing but a trap,” because it “makes you obsessed with your own significance and also riddles you with doubt?” Do you do “harsh things when you believe yourself one-of-a-kind,” push away those you love, and “sneer at those you deem not good enough?” For some individuals, no doubt, being exceptional, or, more precisely, believing that you are exceptional, has these consequences.
But is the only alternative a desire to be “normal,” accompanied by a determination not to stand out? Such a decision, one is tempted to say, is an unfortunate artifact of life in the Soviet Union.
Such a decision might have seemed out of place had Kat moved to Israel, or like Ellen Litman, to the United States. 
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.