Reviews

Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo by Boris Fishman

samarov's review against another edition

reviewed in the Chicago Tribune

We meet Maya Shulman in a New York kitchen, in the midst of a cooking frenzy. She's in America on a soon-to-expire medical school visa but has a dream to open her own cafe. We meet her along with her future husband, Alex, for whom the tastes and smells in that kitchen are a reminder of the Kiev home he was forced to leave as a child. Like so many books about Soviet Jewish immigration, Boris Fishman's Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo begins in New York; unlike most of the others, this one ends in Montana.

Part one, “East” is devoted to how Maya and Alex meet and eventually settle into a comfortable suburban existence in New Jersey. Alex's initial act of gallantry—offering to marry her just weeks after they'd met so she could remain in the country—is not followed by many others. Instead, Maya perceives her lot as a kind of bait-and-switch where none of the life she dreamed for herself can ever come to pass. Her in-laws, Eugene and Raisa Rubin, are an everyday weight on her as well. By agreeing to marry Alex she has effectively shut the door on her own family back in the Ukraine.

Maya is plagued by anxieties and fears. She barely knows how to drive and refuses to get on an airplane. This further circumscribes her existence, giving Alex and the elder Rubins even more power over her reality. What wrenches control from the Rubins is the arrival of a baby. Maya and Alex cannot conceive so Maya convinces Alex (and his parents, because they are in on even this kind of decision) to adopt. Their lives are changed forever, but not in the way every family's is with the arrival of a child. When Max shows up, a fissure opens, which will in time rearrange their lives completely.

One day when he's 8, Max doesn't come home from school. This sets off a frantic search. The school bus driver tells the Rubins that Max was seen getting on local New Jersey bus by himself. He is eventually returned by a woman who finds him face down in a pond on her property. This is not his only inexplicable behavior. He refuses to sleep on his bed, preferring a tent in the yard or the floor of his room and he collects and catalogs various native grasses. He becomes a mystery to the Rubins.

Arguing about what to do to fix what's wrong with their son, Alex and Maya's fight expands to more global grievances. When she accuses him of siding with his father instead of her, Alex says,“For my father, there's no gift without a con wrapped around it. You divide what he says by half and subtract, and you start getting closer. He speaks in Fahrenheit, but the truth is closer to Celsius.” Everyone here is grappling with America, their adoptive home, personified in this inscrutable 8-year-old.

In part two, “West”, Maya, Alex, and Max go on a road trip to trace their child's origins. Though they've been in the country a long time they've never been west of Chicago. Maya is convinced that the answer to what makes Max wild lies in the wide open spaces from which his birth parents came. What she discovers is that the untamed, unsatisfied force which has wreaked havoc on their lives lies a lot closer to home. 

Fishman's book lays plain the contradictions and sacrifices inherent in the immigrant experience. Sometimes the symbols and metaphors are a bit too on the nose: the car the Rubins drive west is called the Escape and the cowboy Maya meets is named Marion, like John Wayne. But more often than not, this book is an eloquent and uncynical tale of how far people must travel to find out what they truly want and who they truly are.

gjmaupin's review against another edition

3.0

Well-written but just not my sort of thing.

pharmdad2007's review against another edition

2.0

I'm getting tired of books about dysfunctional families. I need to read some fantasy or something. Almost thought this book was going to redeem itself when it started quoting Anna Karenina, but then it was just to talk about how dull and overrated the character thought it was. Not cool.

kristinrob's review against another edition

4.0

Maya and Alex are Russian immigrants making a comfortable life for themselves in New Jersey. They adopt Max, and settle into a seemingly happy life. Bur as Max turns eight, his wild side seems to bloom. His parents take him back to where he was born in order to find some answers.

I'm not quite sure that they did.

canadianbookworm's review

3.0

https://cdnbookworm.blogspot.com/2019/01/dont-let-my-baby-do-rodeo.html

clambook's review

3.0

Ho hum. It was well-reviewed but I found it tedious and overwritten, too self-conscious. DNF.