[First Papers is a] leisurely, warm-hearted novel….

[Laura Hobson] writes with sympathy and affection of Stefan Ivarin, an intelligent, idealistic Russian immigrant who became an American not only "by choice, by law, by document," but more profoundly by the conviction that came to him with his first naturalization papers that "a lifetime might go toward validating those papers and being worthy of them."…

His wife, Alexandra, is devoted and worshipful—up to a point; she is herself a woman of energy, passionate convictions, warmth, and an originality that often strikes her conventional children as eccentricity. She mortifies them by such things as her habit of standing on the porch in her old grey bathrobe, lecturing on socialism to the milkman, the garbage man, the delivery man….

Mrs. Hobson succeeds in making Stefan and Alexandra lively, sympathetic people, but she is less successful with her other characters. Eli and...