Poplar fluff

«Emigration is death,» says one of the characters to the hero of this book — a young man who grew up in a family of Moscow scientists and moved to America. Not having settled there either in a provincial southern town in his father's house — a black retired military man — or in the Jewish immigrant community in Brighton Beach, he tries to find support for starting a new life by getting a job in a nursing home for elderly immigrants from the USSR. As the story unfolds, given dynamism by a family-historical investigation and even elements of a police detective story, the young man learns about the difficult moral choices faced by his loved ones during the years of Soviet power and their subsequent attempt to return to forgotten moral roots. Hope for finding solid ground underfoot appears when the hero's seemingly forever lost love returns to his life.