A Clueless Wanderer and Other Short Stories

About the Book

The book is comprised of a story «Clueless Wanderer» and a collection of shorter stories, that describe adventures of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, their dreams and aspirations, success and failures while trying to adjust to the new language and culture. The characters in those stories are neither positive, nor negative – just different people surviving the best they can. Those characters do not represent a certain ethnicity, neither they reside in a certain city. Their images are strange and familiar, helpless and arrogant, funny and pitiful, happy and miserable, frustrated with learning English and proud of their Americanized grandchildren, with whom they cannot communicate. Please don’t judge them too hard.

About the Author

Milena Kunin Portney ia a professional linguist and interpreter; she has command of several European languages. Milena considers her creative writing as an anti-nostalgic method of keeping her native Russian language active. With her special sense of humor, she describes real and unreal events in an American city, where immigrants from the former Soviet Union settled in the last decades of the 20th century. Milena K. Portney lives in Baltimore, Maryland.