Identity and Assimilation in Atomic Anna

The thematic claim of Atomic Anna is that assimilation is not a clean transformation but a painful, ongoing negotiation in which characters must conceal, split, or reinvent parts of themselves—and in doing so, often replicate the very pressures they sought to escape. Rachel Barenbaum traces this struggle across three generations of Soviet Jewish women—Anna, Yulia, and Molly—each wrestling with what it means to be a Jew, a Soviet, and an American, and each finding that belonging comes at a cost.

Yulia’s Performance in Berlin

The story’s earliest exploration of assimilation occurs in Berlin in the late 1930s, where Yulia and Anna share a cramped flat. Yulia, the polyglot and chameleon, commands Anna: “Russian in the flat, that’s fine. Everywhere else, German. Only German.” She sews modern dresses and warns that the neighbors “know we’re Soviets, that’s bad enough.” Yulia’s method of survival is to erase the outer signs of her origins. She even keeps her Jewish identity off official papers, telling Anna, “We can’t escape it, so we might as well embrace it together”—but only in private. This double life allows her to pass, but it also isolates her from her past. When she later presses Anna to become “your project” of transformation, the novel reveals that assimilation is a performance taught and learned, not a natural evolution. Yulia’s trauma—the loss of her sister, the hunger, the murdered parents—is sealed behind a mask of glamour, a trade-off that haunts her.

Molly’s American Balancing Act

The second generation, Molly (born Manya), inherits this conflict in 1960s Philadelphia. Her family lives in a “Little Russia” neighborhood where “everyone spoke Russian and ate borscht,” yet her parents built a fallout shelter from a Life magazine plan, desperate to look American. Molly’s mother straightens her hair with an iron and forbids her from attending the sophomore hop, insisting she study instead of drawing. Molly feels caught: “I’m not really American, not like the kids in school.” At the swimming pool, she tries to stuff her bathing suit to fit in, only to be humiliated. The novel shows that for Molly, assimilation is not a choice but a trap between two worlds. Her father eventually admits, “I can’t be one of them. Not ever. I’m an almost.” That phrase—“an almost”—captures the novel’s central irony: the immigrant dream of becoming anything in America turns into the reality of being almost accepted, almost free, almost whole.

Anna’s Erased Self

Anna’s arc is the most complex. A nuclear physicist, she must hide both her Jewishness and her lesbian identity to work in Soviet science. In Berlin, Otto Hahn warns her that being a Soviet is already a liability; Anna, unlike Yulia, never performs language or dress but instead immerses herself in equations, believing that science is a universal language beyond identity. Yet the Soviet state demands that she build the bomb, and she complies out of a desire to stop Hitler. Later, she time-travels to save her granddaughter, effectively abandoning her own timeline. Anna’s assimilation into the Soviet scientific apparatus requires her to suppress her morality, her family, and her true self. The amplifier she creates becomes a symbol of both connection and erasure—it allows her to jump through time but at the cost of never belonging to any single moment.

Symbolic Connections

The Atomic Anna comics that Molly draws represent a fusion of identities: a Jewish Soviet heroine born from an American comic tradition. Molly uses art to create a self that her schoolmates cannot label. The golden bear pendants (Xenia’s necklace of a bear at peace and a bear at war) symbolize the dual nature each character carries—the peace of acceptance and the war of resistance. For Yulia, the bear might represent the past she cannot release; for Molly, the struggle to be both a good daughter and an individual. The cosmic ray station on Mount Aragats, where Anna attempts to change history, is a liminal space between nations and times, mirroring the liminal identity of the immigrant.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel refuses a simple resolution. Assimilation means survival for Yulia, but it also means she lies to her daughter about the past. Anna’s attempt to save her family through time travel is itself an act of radical assimilation—erasing the timeline in which her own daughter grew up motherless. The Discussion Questions chapter explicitly asks whether “original intentions matter” when outcomes become destructive, and this applies directly to assimilation: do the characters’ good intentions—to protect, to blend in, to rise—justify the losses of language, faith, and history? The novel suggests that identity is not a single choice but a palimpsest, with later generations inheriting the erased traces of earlier ones.

Study Questions and Answers

1. Why does Lazar, who once believed “we can be anything in America,” end up calling himself “an almost”?
   Lazar’s dream is crushed by systemic discrimination: banks deny him loans, and he realizes that hard work does not guarantee belonging. His disillusionment mirrors the arc of many immigrants who discover that the American dream requires them to be both visible and invisible.

2. How do the characters use language as a tool of assimilation?
   Yulia insists on German in public, French when testing Anna, and Russian only in private. Molly learns English but feels its insufficiency when her mother’s Soviet flour ruins cupcakes. Language becomes a marker of acceptance and a barrier to authentic self-expression.

3. What does the golden bear necklace mean to different generations?
   For Xenia, the bear symbolizes the duality of peace and war. For Anna, it may represent the peaceful scientific ambition and the war it unleashed. For Molly, it echoes her own split identity between the safety of home and the conflict of being different.

4. How does Anna’s time travel relate to the theme of assimilation?
   Anna’s jumps erase her physical presence from her original timeline, mirroring how assimilation erases cultural roots. She becomes a ghost in her own life, trying to rewrite history but losing the person she was.

5. Does the novel suggest that assimilation is possible without loss?
   No. Every character who assimilates loses something—Yulia her sister’s memory, Anna her daughter, Molly her sense of authenticity. The novel implies that while survival may require adaptation, true belonging remains elusive.