Go West!

A Soviet-Jewish family from Riga moves ever further west — through Moscow, Vienna, and Italy, all the way to America — and its youngest member, in the end, all the way into space. The tragicomic chronicle of con men, dreamers, and lovable losers, told by an astronaut gazing down from orbit at the Earth and at where he comes from.

Riga, mid-1970s. Ten-year-old Misha Myshkin grows up in a chaotic, loving extended family of Soviet atheists who decide to emigrate — set in motion by Misha’s father Vadim, an eternal runner-up and incorrigible dreamer who has never gotten over the Moon landing. To obtain an exit visa, the family becomes "Jewish" overnight by way of a double wedding on the beach. After an adventurous interlude in Moscow, the road leads to Vienna, where the family washes up in the run-down Pension Esterhazy — and where the secret of ancient great-grandmother Nina is revealed: the surly, one-eyed old woman who spent her whole life insisting she was not Jewish is the family’s only real Jew, a survivor of Rumbula and the camps, silently carrying all of murdered Jewish Riga within her. Nina dies in Vienna; from then on, her ashes travel with the family in an urn.