Summary
Summary
A DEBUT NOVEL OF DARING ORIGINALITY, THE YID GUARANTEES THAT YOU WILL NEVER THINK OF STALINIST RUSSIA, SHAKESPEARE, THEATER, YIDDISH, OR HISTORY THE SAME WAY AGAIN
Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin," is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant.
While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. Levinson's cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson's Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow's premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall.
As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent, Paul Goldberg's THE YID is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction.
Author Notes
Paul Goldberg was born in Moscow in 1959 and emigrated to the U.S. at age 14. An award-winning investigative reporter, he is the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, a weekly publication focused on the business and politics of cancer. His articles have appeared in The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , The Washington Post , and elsewhere, and he has been featured on 60 Minutes, 20/20, CNN and NPR. He is the author of two books on the Soviet human rights movement, The Final Act and The Thaw Generation (with Ludmilla Alexeyeva), and co-author (with Otis Brawley) of a book about the American healthcare system, How We Do Harm . The Yid is his first novel.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Goldberg's lively first novel imagines Soviet history as a violent farce that averts a tragedy for Russia's Jews. The titular "Yid" is Solomon Levinson, a deadly, buffoonish member of a disbanded Yiddish theater company who likens himself to the puppet Petrushka, a "sad, angry clown battling the forces of history." In the novel's breathtaking opening, Levinson verbally duels with, and then brutally dispatches, three soldiers sent to capture him as part of a pogrom in 1953. Stalin, a paranoid "alter kaker" holed up in his country dacha, has given orders to "forever rid the Motherland" of its Jewish population. Levinson decides that the only hope for him and Soviet Jews is to stage a play of his own that deposes the genocidal tyrant. The slightly unhinged director, for whom the lines between stage and reality are blurred, assembles a cast to aid him in his improvised plot, including an accomplished doctor, an orphaned young woman, and an African-American Communist disillusioned at finding the same racism in Soviet Russia as he did in Jim Crow America. Divided into three acts, the novel zips along even as Goldberg smuggles in a healthy dose of fascinating Soviet history-its revolutionaries, artists, absurdities, and poisonous anti-Semitism. The result is a stretch of fictionalized history so fully realized it feels as though it actually happened. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Paul Goldberg emigrated from Moscow to the U.S. at 14 in 1973 and became a reporter focused on Soviet dissidents and cancer research. His firsthand knowledge of Soviet life and his medical expertise inform The Yid, his wily, rambunctiously entertaining first novel about an unlikely group of valorous would-be assassins and one of history's most alarming close calls. A clue to the modus operandi of his tale's irresistible characters is found in Goldberg's journalistic agility and tenacity, which inspired the New York Times to describe him as a Russian émigré with a quirky sense of humor and a thirst for the jugular. In late February 1953, a Soviet security detail is on a routine late-night run to arrest a Jew, an old Yid, Solomon Levinson, once an actor at the celebrated Moscow State Yiddish Theater. Tall, thin, and leaning on a cane, he's an easy mark, if only he would stop talking. Friederich Lewis is an engineer from Omaha and a rare being in the USSR, an African American, leading to his often being hailed as Paul Robeson. When Lewis arrives at his longtime friend Levinson's apartment later that night, the Yid is still in full performance mode and quickly recruits Lewis for a mission that grows more ambitious, dangerous, and outrageous by the minute. This unlikely duo is soon joined by Aleksandr Kogan, a surgeon who, like Levinson, served in the Red Army. He is also targeted for arrest as part of Stalin's Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a genocidal scheme involving the spreading of lies about syringe-wielding Jewish killer doctors, fear-mongering calculated to whip up enough anti-Semitic frenzy to fuel a massive pogrom followed by the deportation of any Jewish survivors to the Siberian Arctic. As the number of Levinson's motley followers grows, so, too, does the body count. Goldberg's rapier-like, galvanizing novel unwinds in three acts punctuated by hilarious, flashing, and slashing dialogue as these rebels of temperaments deliberate and impulsive, skills invaluable and surprising, and memories painful and inspiriting, banter, lewdly insult each other, and argue over Shakespeare, Pushkin, Akhmatova, medical ethics, the broken promise of socialism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Ultimately, they decide that there is only one thing to do: come up with a plan to kill Stalin before he annihilates more than two millions Jews. As the doomsday clock runs down, Goldberg deftly presents plays within plays, in which his heroic, smart, acerbic, wildly improvising, cool-under-fire characters use stagecraft to attempt an impossible mission. Goldberg ingeniously captures the brutality and lunacy of Stalin's rule as well as Russia's stoicism in this spectacularly incisive, humanizing, and comedically cathartic theater of the absurd.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
Library Journal Review
It's early 1953 in Stalin's Russia, and empty cattle cars are rumbling toward population centers across the vast country. Their objective: to collect the nation's Jews in a final pogrom. In this fantastical (and fantastic) debut novel by reporter and writer Goldberg, who immigrated to the United States from the USSR in 1973, a troupe of unlikely Soviet characters assembles with a single objective. Having heard rumors of the impending pogrom, which would have followed the so-called doctors' plot (in which numerous Jewish Soviet doctors were actually arrested for supposedly trying to assassinate top Soviet leaders), our band of unlikely conspirators sets out to do in Stalin before his henchmen unleash the pogrom. The conspirators include Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an elderly actor from the former Jewish State Theater; his friends Aleksandr Kogan, a prominent surgeon who served as a Red Army gunner during the revolution, and Frederick Lewis, an African American working in the country as an engineer; and a mysterious young woman named Kima Petrova. To add to this darkly bubbling froth, the author blends in such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall and treats us to poetry by Anna Akhmatova in Russian and English. The author's justification (none needed!) for his work: "A leap of fiction brings with it the privilege to blend history with fantasy." VERDICT Highly recommended for readers with a grasp of history who enjoy imaginative deviations from what we think we know as historical truth. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/15.]-Edward B. Cone, New York © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.