Note from author: In these documents, the novel is titled SEVEN LIVES OF DINAH ASH, which is what I tentatively called it while looking for representation. However, my agent suggested that there were quite a few “life of” and “lives” titles out there, so as we started querying editors, I changed the title to THE LIGHT OF SEVEN DAYS, which is how the book was published by Delphinium Books/HarperCollins in 2023. THE LIGHT OF SEVEN DAYS came out to very positive reviews and was named one of the “12 Books to Read This Fall” by WBUR/NPR, finalist by the National Jewish Book Award, and honor title by the Massachusetts Book Awards.
Dear [Agent’s Name]:
SEVEN LIVES OF DINAH ASH is about a Russian-born Jewish ballerina who leaves the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991 to escape the rise of antisemitism—and arrives in the United States penniless and clueless. The book immerses the reader in several worlds and contexts: the world of classical ballet, of the late Soviet Union and what it was like to grow up in it Jewish, the psychologically complicated world of new Russian immigrants in the 1990s America.
Orphaned at three, Dinah Ash has a bittersweet childhood and youth in her native St. Petersburg: she plays and makes friends and dances at the Vaganova and falls in love, only to see her fiancé drafted into the Afghan war. Even before Chernobyl and perestroika destabilize the country, she develops a radar for white supremacy and learns to fight. As Dinah loses her grandmother, her fiancé, her country, even ballet, she thinks of each loss as a little death, an end to her old self, and every time she brings herself back to life and begins anew, so not until she faces her physical mortality does she realize that hers is a search for meaning behind loss, a search for identity—human, Russian, American, immigrant, but above all, Jewish. She is an atheist exile from an atheist world, where she was an ethnic minority who learned of her Jewishness only through persecution, yet in the U.S. she finds herself unwittingly a member of a white majority within a nation that defines being Jewish by religious practice. For Dinah, therefore, this search for Judaism is a search for home, for herself and her place in the world, and in America she must wrestle with systemic racism even as she does with cancer before she can find love again and accept the value in her people, her tradition, and her own life.
SEVEN LIVES OF DINAH ASH is a literary novel (~105,000 words) about the essence of culture, about the connection between life and myth, about belonging and not belonging and grandmother’s dumplings, and, of course, about love and death. In the interplay between the American and Eastern European settings, this novel can be compared to Steve Yarbrough’s The Unmade World; in its deep interrogation of Jewishness, to Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark; in its exploration of exile, illness, loss, and Russian émigré identity, to Michael Alenyikov’s Ivan and Misha.
Importantly, the book also bears autobiographical elements and is informed by my personal experience, since I too grew up in the late Soviet Union, in the same city as my protagonist—Leningrad, now St. Petersburg—and moved to the US in 1991 as a Jewish refugee. However, this is where our similarity ends. In Russia I was beginning a career as a concert pianist, and in the U.S. I had my second career teaching religious studies, after which I moved to Massachusetts to take care of my family and write. In 2019, I graduated from Emerson College with an MFA in fiction, and my stories and essays appear in journals like The Common, The Bellevue Literary Review, Arkansas Review, The Long Story, Descant, Commonweal, MacGuffin, and others. As a nonbinary person, I write under the name River Adams (and prefer in life to go by River).
I very much appreciate your time and hope to hear from you.
Sincerely,
River Adams (they/them)