Raisa Abramova

Raisa holding a newspaper article she helped to edit

**Raisa Samsonovna Abramova** (Russian: Раиса Самсонова абрамова, Yiddish: ראַיסאַ סאַמסאָנאָוואַ אַבראַמאָוואַ) is the protagonist Sam Ramey's mother and wife to Lev Abramov. She is primarily a housewife, but also works part-time at *The Daily Forward*, where she performs administrative tasks and helps to edit and organize manuscripts for publication.

Sam and Raisa share a very close relationship and Sam is shown throughout *Sam in New York* to be very protective of her.

Despite their closeness, however, Raisa is uncertain about her son's desire to become an actor. Being a worrywart, she thinks the possibilities of Sam having a stable career as an actor are slim to nil. She fears that he will be belittled and reduced to cameo roles, and by then, it will be too late for him to go into law, since he will have, by then, wasted the best years of his life on the pointless endeavour of acting.

Raisa coddles her son and constantly is worried about his health, his friendships and other aspects of his life. She and her husband have, in fact, spoiled their son, but neither of them seem to have noticed this.

She is also a bit of a gossip and knows almost everything about her son's friends from talking to various people around the neighbourhood. She often is grumpy and does not really like to meet new friends, finding it hard to socialize with people she may not have that much common with.

## Early Life - Her Life Before New York

Like her husband Lev, Raisa was born in the 1860s in Slutsk, a *shtetl* in the Russian Empire. She came from a traditional home and was raised Jewish.

She married Lev at the age of 17 through a matchmaker. She followed Lev once he decided to leave the *shtetl* and they both settled in Odessa, where they became more politically involved. With the help of Lev's cousin, Raisa and Lev opened a French cafe and participated in trading to make ends meet in Odessa. It was around this time Lev and Raisa became involved in writing newspapers. They worked with the *maskilim*, members of the Haskalah movement and forerunners of the Back to Palestine proto-Zionist socialist movement.

Unfortunately, in the 1880s, Lev's father was falsely accused of a crime by the anti-socialist Tsarist government and his brother was seized by the Tsar's army. Terrified by these developments, Lev and Raisa decided to leave Tsarist Russia forever.

In 1894, they resettled in New York, United States of America.

## Raisa's Relationship with Lev

Raisa is not too close with her husband, since their marriage was an arranged one, typical of their times. Sam finds it rather outrageous that his parents do not have the kind of idealized romantic relationship he puts on a pedestal (due to his constant consumption of novels, popular songs, and shows). Because of this, Sam is vehemently against the idea of arranged marriage and is obsessively in love with the idea of being in love.

That is why Sam always envisions himself playing dashing male romantic leads. In his mind, playing these roles means he can fall in love over and over again, and reinvent himself over and over again. Through playing these roles, he ceases being that Jewish Russian immigrant from Lower East Side New York with impossible-to-understand parents. As the Sheikh, as a Cowboy, as various other heroes, he is American, a new man, a man who chooses his own destiny and does not follow the ways of the *shtetl*, that old world his family should’ve left behind them “for good” in Eastern Europe.