Mikhail Iossel’s Sentence Reviewed in One

In the lives of émigrés, refugees, exiles, and immigrants, there is a defining moment, like a door passed through, a before and after when the familiar falls away and the foreign is adopted, for better or worse, a potent mix of emotions along for the ride, the fear and uncertainty of a new beginning, excitement, hope, and later, in some cases, a sense of melancholy for how things turned out vs. how they might have been, fertile terrain for the former Soviet samizdat writer, Mikhail Iossel, whose latest collection, Sentence, is a masterful volume of 38 stories each composed of a single sentence, a memoir-in-stories it might be called, an ode to the past by a man looking back on life, or what he variously refers to as his "second life" or "first life" or "the long-gone one" that took place in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and haunts him still, after 39 years, filling his head and his heart with memories that are "stronger, more vibrant, intense and keenly and sharply detailed and delineated than those of, well, pretty much everything (no, not everything, come on) that came later" and sketched with affecting detail from the opening, "DMD" (Dead Man Drinking), a 25 page story (also, one sentence) that takes place on the Red Arrow express train, "half-empty" (certainly not half-full) as it travels overnight from Moscow to Leningrad two weeks before the narrator's departure for America when his compartment-mate, a beady-eyed, slouching man, in an "excessively and indeed too aggressively friendly wordless introduction, in an almost defiant gesture, produced from his beat-up black cardboard suitcase" an offering that would be impolite to refuse and that prompts the slightly ominous and aphoristic observation that "nothing can bring random travellers through the night close together faster than two bottles of brandy chased with chocolates," or Armenian cognac and chocolate-covered Estonian pralines, if the reader is paying attention, and so it does, bring them together, that is, as they sit side-by-side nibbling and drinking, "quickly forming a deceptively strong bond of nascent open-ended friendship, in the good old literary and cinematic and generically Russian (true that) manner of two strangers sharing a compartment on a night train and getting drunk (wasted would be a more expressive word) together and revealing (as they say in self-help literature) to each other the most essential truths of their respective existences" such as the narrator's early training as an electromagnetic engineer at a secret research institution, the mention of which causes them both to wink at each other "with exaggerated mock-seriousness," the DMD bringing "a knobbly yellow finger to his bloodless, bluish lips to indicate that he knew how to keep a secret, mum as a grave" and the narrator's subsequent ditching of this very important career to be a security guard in the Roller Coaster Unit of the Amusement Sector at the Central Park of Culture and Leisure, a true fact of the author's life, too, as I learned a couple of years ago when I interviewed him for my podcast, a startling revelation that endeared him to me and piqued my lasting interest in his work, but I digress, suffice it to say it was a telling decision for the story's narrator to make, the seriousness of which the DMD recognized, one that meant his companion was of a certain ilk, and that led both men to confess even more, though not without trepidation, at least on the narrator's side, as he explains (in parentheses) that "doing so represented a qualitatively different leap of faith on my part, since … well, this still was the freaking Soviet Union and I didn't know him at all, this man, who could've lied to me about his brain cancer and all that, and who actually could've been a KGB provocateur or some such, sent in to derail my departure for America and ruin my whole freaking life" yet he does, he continues to talk and to ramble on without his usual filter and this is how the reader is plunged into his past, the relatively happy years of his early childhood, the growing awareness of restrictions imposed upon his parents, the complications of his Jewish identity, and later, in his teenaged years, recognition of the false promises of an authoritarian regime that leave him no choice but to apply for an exit visa in order to escape a joyless future, which he does, after several attempts, at the age of 30, making his "permanent departure for the outer world," AKA Massachusetts, to begin with, understanding his prolonged anxiety only decades later, a telling moment conveyed with great skill in "Exhale," when a man is struck by the realization that he lived throughout his 20s as if "he'd been holding his breath continually all that time, at once loving and loathing and fearing that inescapable vast confine of his unfortunate accidental birth" only letting go, or exhaling, when on board the plane that flew him from Leningrad to Frankfurt, the first leg of his momentous journey, and the "uncommonly amiable flight attendant … told him, in response to his timid query, that yes, indeed they had in fact just left the Soviet airspace," a feat that might otherwise be called a triumph, though not one that didn't come at great cost, or that didn't forge within him a lifelong aversion to dictators, or private citizens with authoritarian leanings, and a sixth sense around creeping political shifts like the one we're witnessing south of our border in a country once considered a beacon of democracy but looking more and more like the country Iossel escaped, a dangerous situation he has skewered in his political writings, including in Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling (2018) where he calls Putin a "remarkably vengeful and cruel, amoral and corrupt man," and Trump "an empty-headed, ridiculously narcissistic, sociopathic man-child," never one to mince words, his anger and incredulity at America's sleepwalking toward oppression unleashed on readers, though despite its gaining rather than diminishing prospect in 2025, not central to his new book, Sentence, the one on review here, where politics takes a back seat to personal reflections and the kind of gloomy, lush prose found in previous collections, Every Hunter Wants to Know and Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, making it a joy to encounter like meeting an old friend on the street and ducking into a dark pub to reminisce, all the tenderness back on the page, the most moving example, arguably, being "Waltz No 2" where a professor in Montreal, let's just call him Iossel, is stopped in his tracks during his commute to work by the sound of a violin playing Shostakovich, that enchanting waltz in a minor key that seems to speak directly to the Russian soul, and is overcome "by one very specific and vivid, long-dormant recollection that had floated at the instant, out of nowhere, to the rippling surface of [his] mind—one of listening (and not quite listening either but being keenly aware nevertheless of its playing in the background) to this very piece of music," a memory from 1982 during a summer of his less-entangled youth at a beachfront restaurant on the Black Sea with "the beautiful (yes, beautiful she was, believe me) smart funny young woman girl that I was in love with at the time (she is dead now, as are probably, ah undoubtedly, way more than half of all the people I've ever known in my life)," and oh, it's painful to read and so very real, as are all the emotions and stories collected in this book, a sonorous opus from a writer whose exceptional perspective remains as crucial and relevant to the future as it was to the past.