Russia

Russia matters in All My Puny Sorrows less as a place Elfrieda Von Riesen is known to visit than as the source of a painful family history. Her suggestion that she might go there to explore her roots brings into the open what her parents struggle to discuss: the family’s origins in Siberia, violence against their Mennonite ancestors, and the inherited silence surrounding that past.

Ancestral History

The Von Riesen family’s grandparents came from a small Mennonite village in Siberia. Their history is tied to 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, and to violence that the family remembers as catastrophic. The narrator recounts that her paternal grandfather’s parents were killed beside their barn, while he survived by hiding. He was later transported with thousands of other Mennonites by cattle car to Moscow and sent on to Canada. Russia and Siberia therefore signify not simply an ancestral homeland but also the rupture that forced the family away from it.

Elfrieda’s Proposed Journey

At seventeen, Elfrieda is preparing to leave home for Norway, where she will give a recital and study with an elderly teacher she calls the Wizard of Oslo. At dinner, weeks before her departure, she says that while in Europe she might also travel to Russia to explore her roots. Her father, Jake Von Riesen, reacts with alarm and tells her she will not go; Elfrieda answers that she might. The exchange establishes a contrast between her curiosity about the family’s origins and her parents’ fear of revisiting them. The evidence presents Russia as a proposed extension of her European journey, not as a destination she is shown reaching.

Silence and Inherited Trauma

For Elfrieda’s parents, even a slight reference to Russia can provoke an intense reaction. The narrator explains that Plautdietsch carries a history of shame and that Mennonites in the family had learned to endure pain in silence. Her paternal grandfather had warned her parents not to teach their children the language if they wanted them to survive. Later, her mother’s education as a therapist gives her a way to understand how suffering from the past can pass from one generation to another. The family’s response to Russia thus joins geographic memory to a pattern of withheld speech and inherited distress.

Narrative Significance

Russia is one of the subjects Jake does not want to discuss, alongside sex. That refusal makes Elfrieda’s proposal more than a travel idea: it presses against a family boundary and reveals how different generations approach the same history. Her desire to investigate her roots meets the parents’ effort to keep painful memories at a distance. Through that tension, Russia becomes a point where migration, family silence, and the transmission of trauma converge.