"When I read about the families who were separated in the chaos of train stations, I knew I wanted to try to use this in a piece of fiction. Thinking of a lost small child, I calculated the age she would need to be for the story to be contemporary; I brought her to New York (my city), and gave her a family I could describe."
"My neighbor runs a monthly comedy night at a beloved restaurant on the Lower East Side, and I've watched the performers she has brought in. At first, I made Yasmina and Abul comedians just as a way for the two friends to run into each other again, and I already had the girls making sex jokes to each other as teen-agers. But I also knew that something darker was coming in the narrative, and this provided a very unsentimental form of preparation and contrast."
Nicole and Yasmina are childhood friends whose lives diverge, converge, and diverge again amid an increasingly precarious political moment. Millions of Soviet citizens were evacuated to Uzbekistan during the Second World War; families were separated in chaotic train stations. A lost small child is brought to New York, raised there, and later encounters history again through her family. Yasmina and her partner Abdul perform as comedians, a profession that reconnects the friends and offers an unsentimental preparation and contrast for darker developments. Nicole narrates from a deliberate distance, acknowledging she is not Uzbek and avoiding presumption about Yasmina's knowledge.
Read at The New Yorker
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