THE LIGHT OF SEVEN DAYS

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.