A Door Behind a Door (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Olga has worked hard to escape and evade the traumas of her childhood, to shut them behind layers of locked doors, and hide within a new life, far from her ancestral home. But an unconfronted past never stays buried for long. This surreal and aesthetically grungy novel is all about the dangers and consequences of trauma left unchecked, in individuals, in communities long scattered, and even in estranged families.
— Daniel K"A Door Behind a Door is loose, dreamy, and symbol-packed... The resurfacing of characters from Olga's past in her new city speaks to the theme of immigration in the novel, of new homes and the passage from old to new--a passage that is perhaps not ever fully complete in the sense that the past cannot be shaken." --Marta Balcewicz, Ploughshares
In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of '91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga's past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.