All Russians Love Birch Trees

We know about the immigrant experience from an American perspective, but Grjasnowa gives us a fresh, important understanding from the European perspective, showing how Christians, Muslims, and Jews, those ethnically German and those not, don't quite manage coexistence in contemporary Germany. Azerbaijan-born Grjasnowa was 12 when she moved there, so she speaks with authority, as does her heroine, Masha Kogan, who's fluent in five languages and works as an interpreter. Masha is from an ethnically Russian family that fled Azerbaijan for Frankfurt, and she's Jewish despite her given name (Masha being a diminutive of Maria). Among her closest friends are cointerpreter Cem, Frankfurt-born but of Turkish origin, and first lover Sami, originally from Beirut but now a German citizen. As Masha says, almost without irony, they're "perfectly integrated model foreigners." Then her life is upended by the death of her boyfriend, Elias, and as she copes with her grief, desperate not to forget, she rediscovers German disdain. Still, she's not at home in Israel when there on assignment; for her, true home seems to reside in her nexus of friends.