Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

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.

Boris Fishman was born in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, and other publications. He is the editor of Wild East: Stories From the Last Frontier, an anthology about Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, and the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center, among others. A Replacement Life is his first novel.

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ISBN: 9780062287878
Published: Harper - June 3rd, 2014