The Light of Seven Days: A Novel

by River Adams

Overview

Living with her Babby after her parents’ death, 10-year-old Dinah Ash is invited to train at Leningrad’s legendary Vaganova Ballet School. In the world of elite dance, she works hard, falls in love, and weathers the Soviet Union’s ubiquitous antisemitism, but despite an impressive talent, she quickly learns that dancers of her “profile” don’t make prima ballerinas. Love of Leningrad, ballet, friends, family, and books sustain Dinah until history intervenes. The Soviet war in Afghanistan, the rise of perestroika, and a re-emergence of Nazism leave her vulnerable and exposed. Realizing escape is her only option, she applies for refugee status in America. Dinah’s adjustment to life in the US is a test as much of her identity as of her perseverance. Is who she is something Dinah can forge on her own? Or is identity imposed by upbringing, public opinion, and the myths of our cultures? As Dinah struggles with the questions of religion, race, and worth, her choices and the people she encounters will determine whether the dream of a better life can survive the weight of the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953002259
Publisher:	Delphinium
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	484,116
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

After growing up a concert pianist in late Soviet Russia, River Adams (they/them) came to America as a Jewish refugee. They graduated from Rosemont College and Harvard Divinity School, then returned to Philadelphia to teach religious studies and work as a medical interpreter for Russian-speaking patients. Today, having earned an MFA from Emerson College, they live in Massachusetts. They are the author of many published short stories and essays and a biography of Leonard Swidler, There Must Be YOU (2014). The Light of Seven Days is their debut novel.

Editorial Reviews

07/31/2023

Adams’s bracing debut novel is both an indictment and a backhanded appreciation of late-20th-century America from the point of view of an émigré from the Soviet Union. Ten-year-old Dinah Ash is living with her grandmother Babby in Leningrad in the 1970s when she’s chosen for the prestigious Vaganova School of ballet. She trains for years, and falls head over heels for a fellow dancer, but once she joins the prestigious Kirov ballet company at 17 she learns she will not thrive there for one reason: she is a Jew. Her boyfriend is sent to Afghanistan to fight the mujahideen, Babby dies, and life under Gorbachev in the renamed St. Petersburg becomes rampant with “nationalism. Rising, rabid, spreading ethno-nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-anything-not-Russian-ism.” Dinah resolves to leave and ends up in Philadelphia, where her first years are miserable: working at a Russian grocery store, she pines for her homeland, which, in spite of the deprivations, still feels richer and deeper in her memory than life surrounded by strip-mall ugliness and different forms of racism. She eventually joins a dance company, only to become gravely ill. In the book’s first chapter, Dinah reveals she has a virulent form of cancer and foretells the deaths of most of the other Russian characters after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Adams’s affecting insight into their adopted home and the Russia they left—Adams emigrated from the old Soviet Union, too—is well worth the troika ride. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"In River Adams’ bracing and lyrical debut, The Light of Seven Days, a ballerina from the Soviet Union escapes to Philadelphia, a land of McDonalds and RiteAids, and the questions she finds: What is it like to flee from radical extremism? What does it mean to be white? To be American? To believe in God? could not be larger or more relevant. Adams’ novel reminds us that the eyes of the immigrant and the artist alike can make the familiar seem strange and the strange familiar."

Kevin Birmingham

2023-07-13
In Adams’ first novel, a young Russian Jewish ballerina comes of age and immigrates to America.

Dinah lived in Leningrad with her Babby after her parents’ deaths. As a young girl, she was invited to study at a famous ballet school, where she worked hard against difficult odds. Amid political turmoil, with a resurgence of Nazism culminating in a traumatic antisemitic experience, Dinah applied for refugee status to leave the city and life she once loved and immigrated to America, where she settled in Philadelphia. The novel begins with Dinah as an adult in Philadelphia confronting a critical crossroads in her life, finding comfort in a surprising encounter with Judaism. The reader, however, is as yet unaware of the complicated twists of religious and national identity that have brought her to this point. The story then turns back to her childhood in the Soviet Union two decades earlier and slowly builds up to that moment. As it spans decades and oceans, the novel asks questions of belonging and culture, inviting a reconsideration of Soviet, Soviet Jewish, and American Jewish identities through a recent immigrant’s eyes. Adams’ lyrical prose paints a lush, vivid, and imagistic portrait of the world through Dinah’s eyes. Careful aesthetic intention is evident in each sentence, and if the plot is sometimes slow-moving, it is worth it for the sake of the luminous prose. Rosy scenes of Dinah’s youth with her Babby sometimes read like a love letter to childhood, made all the more poignant by their juxtaposition with occasional flash-forwards that reveal, plainly and without fanfare, the eventual and often tragic fate of a minor character. Rich descriptions of Dinah’s early life in Leningrad, brimming with sensory details, remind us of the stakes of immigrating, making palpable all that she has lost in her pursuit of a “better life.”

A quiet, artfully rendered story of the beauty and difficulty of coming-of-age between cultures, in the shadow of history.

Kirkus Reviews

"Adams’ lyrical prose paints a lush, vivid, and imagistic portrait of the world through Dinah's eyes.... A quiet, artfully rendered story of the beauty and difficulty of coming-of-age between cultures, in the shadow of history." — Kirkus Reviews

“In River Adams' bracing and lyrical debut, The Light of Seven Days, a ballerina from the Soviet Union escapes to Philadelphia, a land of McDonalds and RiteAids, and the questions she finds: What is it like to flee from radical extremism? What does it mean to be white? To be American? To believe in God? could not be larger or more relevant. Adams’ novel reminds us that the eyes of the immigrant and the artist alike can make the familiar seem strange and the strange familiar.” — Kevin Birmingham, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

"In River Adams' lush, richly textured novel, we are taken so completely inside the Jewish Russian emigre experience, we forget the world we are sitting in. We breathe the close air of the ballet studio, taste the fresh black bread, and feel the terror of being 'other' in 1990s Leningrad. The journey from the Soviet Union to Philadelphia is exquisitely wrought and includes explorations of found family, the personal divine, and how to spend our short years on earth."—Jennifer Acker, author of The Limits of the World

"A bittersweet portrait of a young immigrant. River Adams offers an eye-opening account of the absurdities and private joys of late-twentieth-century Russia, as well as of class and race in America, in language that is frank, sensuous, and heartbreaking."—Michelle Syba, author of End Times

"...an intimate and nuanced exploration of religion, nationality and personal identity in their impactful debut novel."—NPR, Boston WBUR radio

From the Publisher

Adams’ novel reminds us that the eyes of the immigrant and the artist alike can make the familiar seem strange and the strange familiar.”

New York Times bestselling author Kevin Birmingham