A Replacement Life - Softcover

Fishman, B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0957548893 ISBN 13: 9780957548893

Publisher: HarperCollins UK, 2015

Synopsis

A failing young Russian American journalist's life is unexpectedly transformed when he forges Holocaust restitution claims for his rogue grandfather and his friends Young Russian immigrant Slava Gelman wants to be a great American writer, but is only a researcher at a New Yorker-style magazine. When his beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, dies, his grandfather corners him with a request: could he forge a few Holocaust restitution claims? Slava resists at first, but eventually his semi-fictional accounts turn out to be the best writing he has ever done. Although he lives in fear of discovery and continues to stumble from one tragicomic incident to another, by the time Slava is finally confronted by a German government employee he is ready to play a role that is - almost - heroic. Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1979 and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He is the editor of Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review and other publications. He lives in New York City. A Replacement Life is his first novel.

About this title

From the Back Cover

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 reparations 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 in 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 a truth and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention at 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 lasting price from his family.

A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice. 

About the Author

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1979; his family moved to the United States at the age of nine. He is the editor of Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times magazine, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review and other publications. He lives in New York City. A Replacement Life is his first novel. ONE will publish his second, Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, in 2016.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0957548893
• ISBN 13: 9780957548893
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336