This bi-lingual fragmentary fictive narrative revolves around a young immigrant to the US from the USSR - Misha - struggling to find his cultural identity in the mid-1990's. Taking the shape of a memoir, the work struggles with memory, and especially the dubious ability to accurately portray past events through language, even inside of a single mind. The vignettes follow the associative logical jumps of distant and not-so-distant memories, are often tangential to one another, and are never complete stories.;This partial structure allows the book to pursue several topics at once. These issues are fairly normal for a boy of Misha's age and in his position: he worries about food, girls, friends, and most importantly, how and where he fits in the cultural landscape of mid-90's American (or Russian?) life. The first three naturally shine a light on Misha's attempts to figure himself out - the food bringing him closer to Russia, but friends and girlfriends, closer to America - and all in turn help illuminate the larger, looming questions about the nature of memory and how it helps define us.;Episodic in nature, the book largely follows Misha and his best friend, Paul, through their senior year in high school, with several divergences into various past and future points on the time line. The stories themselves, however, are of secondary importance, taking a back-seat to patches of poetic description, the alien beauty of a foreign language embedded in an English book, and tiny very private winking glimpses into a different culture from a narrator who has safe passage through both. The two friends, emigrants of different cultures, learn to deal with stress at school, discover love, try to find their cultural identities, and in the end are left with a sense of completeness born - like Misha's sandwich - only of their fragmented natures.
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