Abstract: Since the 1970’s to the end of the twentieth century, America witnessed a colossal exodus of Russian citizens to its soil, especially, people belonging to the Jewish faith. Due to the harsh anti-Semitic policies of the then Communist regime of Soviet Russia, many Russian Jews immigrated to various counties, chiefly, to Israel, Germany, the United States, and a few European nations. Of them all, a vast majority of the immigrants made America their preferred home for resettlement. Gary Shteyngart belongs to one such immigrant family. As a representative of the younger generation of Russian-American novelists, Shteyngart, like his third-wave émigré predecessor Joseph Brodsky, registers his immigrant experiences in English. His writings, predominantly fiction, explores the Jewish immigrant experience in the United States – which is one of the major centres of resettlement for the Soviet-Jews. This paper aims to investigate the wide-ranging issues of cultural hybridity, identity, and the hurdles in assimilation as featured in Shteyngart’s memoir Little Failure (2014). The paper shall focus on Russian related themes depicted in his work, such as, hardships caused due to displacement, problems in assimilation and acceptance in a foreign land, questions of identity, to name a few. Shteyngart skilfully interplays the Russian and American elements back-and-forth in his works, thereby pioneering a new style of English literary landscape, abundant with Russian words and phrases, which is neither Russian nor American – but just like Shteyngart a pure hybrid: Russian-American.

Keywords: Hybridity, Immigration, Jewish, Identity, Nostalgia