BOOKS FROM BELARUSA Replacement Life
Description:
Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Winner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York. Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has—as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn’t his grandson a “writer”? High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him—Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American—but he wants to be a lionized writer even more. Slava’s turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family. A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.
Reviews:
(6 months ago) |
17 Mar, 2025
An interesting book. I had a slightly difficult time at first with the sometimes deliberately fractured English, but I got used to the writing.
Slava, emigrated from Belarus with his parents and grandparents when he was still a child. He now works for a New York newspaper as a junior who hopes to get his articles published. Although he has been very close to his family, there is a distance now, he is trying to fit in with being “American” in Manhattan, rather than with the Brooklyn immigrants in the neighbourhood he grew up in. At his grandmother’s funeral, he is asked by his grandfather to invent a story so he can claim for repatriation from the German government for the crimes committed against Jews.
This book explores the relationships between first generation migrants and their children, as well as the hardships that many Russian Jews suffered during the war, even if they were not in Ghettos.
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