From Powells.com
Staff Pick
The Yid is smart and darkly funny and tells personal stories against a huge historical backdrop. Inventive, quick, and heartbreaking (but never for too long), Goldberg's debut novel told me a lot I didn't know in the best way possible. Recommended By Doug C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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; Friederich 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 — with echoes of Inglourious Basterds and Seven Samurai — The Yid is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction.
Review
“This sophisticated entertainment transcends historical detail with
flighty dialogue exchanges that, presented in script style, seem like a
cross between Samuel Beckett and Sholem Aleichem…. For all its dark,
discursive content, Goldberg's novel about unlikely rebels plotting
Stalin’s downfall is streaked with hard-earned wisdom.” Kirkus Reviews
Review
“Breathtaking… 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.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“Wily, rambunctiously entertaining [with] irresistible
characters....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....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.” Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
Review
“[A] fantastical (and fantastic) debut novel...Highly recommended for
readers with a grasp of history who enjoy imaginative deviations from
what we think we know as historical truth.” Edward B. Cone, Library Journal (starred review)
About the Author
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.