Friday short fiction #33: Emigrés

David Ohmer   Ellis Island Immigrants   2008
While looking at stories of immigrants this week (because strictly speaking I am one, though not yet resident) I realised it was thirty years ago on Tuesday that I first became an immigrant worker, in a Saudi Arabian advertising agency in Jeddah (it was not a good experience). These stories are all about experiences of life in a country built on immigration, and how the values one grew up with back home don't always apply elsewhere.

Amin Ahmad, 'Catfish'  (NARRATIVE MAGAZINE, MARCH 2010)
Clearly a semi-autobiographical story, about an Indian man living in Boston whose father eventually visits from Calcutta. But what will happen to his father's beloved pet catfish? Slightly bittersweet in tone, this takes a little while to hit its stride but when it does it works well, even though some of the scene-setting gives away a writer clearly undecided about his narrative point of view.

Mehrnoosh Mazarei, 'Two Men'  (NARRATIVE MAGAZINE, 7 AUGUST 2011)
A gentle story about two Arab ex-guerillas now living in Los Angeles and commiserating their losses over a few drinks. I could be mistaken but I think there's a subtle subtext here, too, about how hard it is to walk away from violence as a means of self-validation.

Mary Anne Mohanraj, 'Counting to Ten'  (RAJINI SRIKANTH, ed., CATAMARAN #5, 2006)
Two Sri Lankan sisters in Chicago are having both good and bad fortunes with their American boyfriends. A quick story stripped down to its dialogue, yet it also covers a lot of ground and doesn't leave any gaps.

Favourite short story of the week: James Purdy, 'Summer Tidings'  (GRANTA #1, AUTUMN 1979)
At the turn of the Twentieth Century a Jamaican gardener at an American mansion sees the lives of his multi-millionaire employer and neighbours as something both unreachable and untouchable. There is of course still a big divide between the races and the immigrant has long known that his life is largely irrelevant to them, hence the story's rather heartbreaking denouement. This was from Granta Magazine's first issue focussing on New American Writing and Purdy's story was something of a centrepiece; he had been writing since the mid-1950s and had always focussed on American society's outsiders, and I'd certainly like to read more by him.