Many of his relatives back in America thought Daniel’s fascination with Russian culture was simply a fleeting interest. They called it “The Russia Phase” as he boarded planes and traveled throughout the Soviet Union.

But while improving his vocabulary and vying for a job in Russian television, Daniel discovered an aspect of Russian culture that turned out to be far more potent than any vodka.

Love.

In his novel, “Leaving Katya,” Paul Greenberg tells how Daniel meets a Russian woman named Katya while touring the Soviet Union weeks before “perestroika,” the economic and political reforms of the late 1980s. It quickly turns into a hot romance that brings Katya to the United States to be with Daniel.

“If I was rash and impulsive, then so was Katya. And actually, without rashness and impulsiveness there would have only been those halting American phrases that had always tripped me up in high school and college, ‘Do you like me?’ ‘Can I kiss you?’ ‘Will I see you again?’ There was none of that with Katya. Just attraction and motion.”

But Daniel soon learns that loving a Russian woman is complicated. Katya is moody and secretive, traits he never expected to find nor thought he would fall for.

“I could still feel the warm, pleasant abrasion where Katya had crushed up against me, and I couldn’t stifle a guilty smile thinking of what I might later describe as a conquest. But I also sensed a growing twinge of unpleasantness over what had just happened. In this city, where a gray melancholy rose up daily and washed over the population like a flood tide, Russian women were a kind of breakwater. Peter the Great’s buildings might peel and fade, Empress Catherine’s parks might grow tired and weedy, but every morning thousands of young Leningrad women made up their faces, their hair, their clothes miraculously out of nothing, with nothing, and for no other reason, it seemed, than to restore beauty to the world.”

“Leaving Katya” gets into the mind of a man who is up against a double whammy: fighting to keep his relationship alive while watching his beloved’s country fall apart. In a way, the collapse of the Soviet Union works as a metaphor for the relationship between Katya and Daniel, and readers wait to see them bounce back, however slowly, like the fractured republic.

It’s a story about trying to make love work despite language and geographical barriers. Daniel’s character is stubborn but honest. When it comes to Katya, Daniel takes on an almost Soviet frame of mind to work at it until he sees results, regardless of how long it takes. And every now and then, he sees the fruits of his labors.

This is a surprisingly solid first novel, and Greenberg manages to dodge the bullet that would make it a sappy love story. Although some of the ingredients are here Russia, a beautiful woman, and a terrible longing when things go wrong he stays on track.