LENA GORELIK WAS BORN in 1981 in what was then known as Leningrad and came to Germany in 1992, where she and her family were accepted as Jewish quota refugees. The present chapter is concerned with Gorelik's two autofictional writings Meine weißen Nächte (My White Nights, 2004) and Lieber Mischa … du bist ein Jude (Dear Mischa … you are a Jew, 2012). Meine weißen Nächte is Gorelik's first novel and tells the experience of migration through the naive point of view of a child. By representing the child's astonished perception of Germany, Gorelik reflects the immense economic and cultural difference between the socialist East and the capitalist West in an amusing manner. A satirical novel in the form of a fictional letter to her son, Lieber Mischa is concerned with Germany's memory culture with regard to Judaism and the Holocaust. Gorelik shows that the dominance of the “uniqueness-of-the- Holocaust frame” leads to an exaggerated philo-Semitism that once again excludes the Jews. The fictional letter ridicules the German population's rituals of remorse, which turn the Jews into a community of victims.

The writings of Olga Grjasnowa and Lena Gorelik have repeatedly been analyzed together. Indeed, there exist striking parallels in Grjasnowa and Gorelik's biographies: both were born in the Soviet bloc in the 1980s and came to Germany in the 1990s as Jewish quota refugees. The two books by Gorelik which I will consider in this chapter resemble Grjasnowa's Der Russe ist einer der Birken in several thematic areas: the sudden rise of interest in the family's own Jewish background the moment it became an entry ticket to Germany (MwN, 86; DR, 50); the protagonist's difficulty starting in a German school without knowing the language; and the subsequent resentment over being viewed as posterimmigrants, receiving compliments on their excellent German (DR, 18). Also, their texts crucially seek to represent the contrast between the perception of Jewishness as an ethnicity (Volkszugehörigkeit), as listed under Point 5 in Russian passports, and the German perception of Jews as a community of victims whose immigration is welcomed by the German government (DR, 50–51; MwN, 90; Mischa, 25).