Memory s Tailor - Hardcover

Rudner, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578060907 ISBN 13: 9781578060900

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 1998

Synopsis

Alexandr Davidowich Berman has made his living sewing costumes for the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. Old, weary, and alert to anti-Semitism, he has retired. Although he has shut himself up in his tiny apartment, the curator of the Catherine Museum finds him and commissions him to repair tsarist clothing for a traveling exhibition.

One day while mending a vintage coat, Berman discovers a scrolled manuscript sewn into the lining. It is a letter written by a nameless Jew who lived in the early 1800s under Nicholas I. "I am a man of no importance. I only want my son to come back."

Inspired by this document-the world's smallest Torah-the tailor is seized by a mission. Before they are forgotten, he is determined to collect the life stories of Soviet Jews and secretly sew them into the historical clothing preserved in Russia's great museums, even into the suit worn by Lenin's corpse.

With Simon Moscovich Zorin, a retired glassblower he dragoons as his driver and companion, this tailor of Jewish memory crosses Russia and the Ukraine on a fantastic, sometimes comical journey. The histories of these two old men and of Russian Jews they meet during the sojourn recreate a vivid picture of Jewry over many turbulent centuries. Berman's odyssey to preserve his people's long heritage culminates in Moscow in 1991 on the day the Soviet government collapses.

Memory's Tailor is Lawrence Rudner's second novel. He writes here with irony and magic that have inspired comparisons with works by Singer, Kosinski, and Garc¡a-M rquez. Combining comedy, tragedy, and a sense of magical realism, Rudner makes this human story shine as a heartfelt witness to an epic of love, suffering, and endurance.

Before his death at age 48 in 1995, Rudner had been acclaimed as a writer of great promise. His first novel, The Magic We Do Here (1988) was praised highly by readers and critics.

Memory's Tailor, which he had completed just before he died, is the full flowering of a powerful talent.

Lawrence Rudner was a professor of journalism, world literature, Holocaust literature, and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Memory's Tailor was prepared for publication by novelist John Kessel, Rudner's colleague at North Carolina State University, and by Susan Ketchin, author of The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction (University Press of Mississippi), and the first editor of the University Press of Mississippi's fiction series.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Rudner was a professor of journalism, world literature, Holocaust literature, and creative writing at North Carolina State University.

From the Inside Flap

A powerful novel in which an elderly Jew journeys across the Soviet Union on a quest to preserve ethnic memory

Reviews

Completed shortly before his death in 1995, Rudner's soaring allegorical fantasy about a retired Russian Jewish tailor who embarks on a self-appointed mission across the Soviet Union during Gorbachev's perestroika to collect the oral testimony of Jews is mordantly funny and moving. Exuberant and heartbreaking, it is both a celebration of Jewish identity and an exorcism of suffering and evil. Alexandr Davidowich Berman, 69, a survivor of WWII combat and Nazi death camps, orphaned by Stalin's murder of his parents, remains nonreligious, an apostate, until one day he unearths a tiny scrolled manuscript, sewn into an old coat, which bears witness to czarist persecution of Jews in the early 1800s. Galvanized into action, and joined by irreverent, hard-drinking retired glassblower/ bugler/actor Simon Zorin, Berman undertakes a haphazard grand tour, tape recorder in hand. His random interviews with Jews serve as a springboard for Rudner's sorties into history--the Napoleonic Wars, the Nazi onslaught against Russia, the Soviet mass murder of 30,000 Polish officers in Katyn forest, the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, an ultranationalist demonstration by Pamyat hooligans. There are cameos by a dying Tolstoy, a paranoid Stalin and Cold War-era KGB chief Yuri Andropov. The duo's adventure is full of surreal touches, as when Berman, appointed to mend Lenin's decomposing trousers, tweaks the Bolshevik's waxy nose and inserts a letter inside his silk shirt. Rudner (a former Holocaust literature professor and author of the praised novel The Magic We Do Here) brings absurdist humor to his madcap expose of the Soviet "socialist paradise" as a house of cards, an arbitrary, irrational, totalitarian hell rife with deeply ingrained anti-Semitism.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Alexandr Davidowich Berman is an old Soviet Jewish tailor of extraordinary skill. While repairing garments in a museum exhibit, he stumbles upon "the world's smallest Torah," hidden inside a frayed coat. Secreted within is the sad tale of a stolen Jewish child. Berman, transfixed by the notion that stories of lost Jews are disappearing from history's consciousness, becomes determined to collect and preserve more such tales. As he sews his way across the Soviet Union, eschewing payment in exchange for extraordinary stories of ordinary people who lived Russian/Soviet history from the czars to the Holocaust and after, it soon becomes clear that Berman's mission is on a collision course with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet government. Part Don Quixote, part fairy tale, this book puts the reader at the center of Berman's obsessed, tender-hearted world as he careens toward disaster. Rudner, author of the highly acclaimed The Magic We Do Here (LJ 5/15/88), was diagnosed with cancer in 1994 and died before he could see this book published. His final work is recommended for all libraries.ABeth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1578060907
• ISBN 13: 9781578060900
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 297
• Editor: Kessel John, Ketchin Susan