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A Replacement Life
A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the 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 restitution 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 to 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 the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in 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 price from his family.
A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.
Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution 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 to 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 the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in 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 price from his family.
A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.
341 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 227 reviews
October 31, 2014
Slava Gelman is a junior staffer at a magazine that isn't but might as well be The New Yorker, where his assignment is to ferret out and crack wise about absurd news items in small-town newspapers. Slava lives on the Upper East Side, which isn't but might as well be on the other side of the world from "Soviet Brooklyn" where he landed as a child on arrival from Minsk (as did Fishman), where his grandparents still live and which his parents fled for suburban New Jersey. When Slava's grandmother dies, he treks via subway to Brooklyn and before long is trekking regularly, roped by his scheming grandfather into crafting (he's a writer, isn't he?) a fictitious claim to the German government for a slice of the reparations pie earmarked for Holocaust survivors. So what if Grandfather didn't suffer precisely as required to be eligible? Didn't the Germans make sure to kill those who did? So begins Boris Fishman's darkly comic and very impressive debut novel.
Fishman pulls off a difficult feat in a first novel, even one so closely grounded in his own experience. He has written a book that is both funny and genuinely moving. The Jews of Brighton Beach, who survived the Nazis and the Soviets through cunning, luck and sheer force of will, are a brilliantly drawn tough lot, re-inventing themselves once again in a place where you can "afford to be decent." Slava wants to free himself from "the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn" and earn a byline by writing elegant prose but in borrowing true elements of his dead grandmother's life to fashion false narratives for his grandfather and his grandfather's friends, he is drawn more deeply into the past and into the community he has longed to escape.
Poor, confused Slava, torn between past and present, loyalty and honor, skinny uptown Arianna and luscious childhood playmate Vera,...Is he being followed? Will his fraud be uncovered? At what cost? Will he do the right thing? I loved this book. Fishman tells a good story, one with moral ambiguity and conflicting loyalties, and his prose crackles with irony and wit. If you were in any danger of thinking that the immigrant experience has been exhaustively mined in fiction, think again. Boris Fishman is a welcome voice and "A Replacement Life" is a wholly original and worthy contribution.
Fishman pulls off a difficult feat in a first novel, even one so closely grounded in his own experience. He has written a book that is both funny and genuinely moving. The Jews of Brighton Beach, who survived the Nazis and the Soviets through cunning, luck and sheer force of will, are a brilliantly drawn tough lot, re-inventing themselves once again in a place where you can "afford to be decent." Slava wants to free himself from "the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn" and earn a byline by writing elegant prose but in borrowing true elements of his dead grandmother's life to fashion false narratives for his grandfather and his grandfather's friends, he is drawn more deeply into the past and into the community he has longed to escape.
Poor, confused Slava, torn between past and present, loyalty and honor, skinny uptown Arianna and luscious childhood playmate Vera,...Is he being followed? Will his fraud be uncovered? At what cost? Will he do the right thing? I loved this book. Fishman tells a good story, one with moral ambiguity and conflicting loyalties, and his prose crackles with irony and wit. If you were in any danger of thinking that the immigrant experience has been exhaustively mined in fiction, think again. Boris Fishman is a welcome voice and "A Replacement Life" is a wholly original and worthy contribution.
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August 14, 2016Very impressive debut novel. People have been comparing this book to Gary Shteyngart's novels, but that isn't right. Fishman and Shteyngart are both Soviet-Jewish immigrants, yes, but they are completely different writers. Shteyngart is about the raw comedy of the id; Fishman is much more controlled and analytical. Here, we get a close third person account of a young immigrant shlemiel who gets roped by his grandfather into writing false accounts of his grandfather's friends' WWII years in a scam to get money from the German government. It's a great set-up for black comedy and in terms of style and approach it's heavily influenced by Malamud and Gogol.
Shlemiel stories are a staple of Jewish literature, but what's interesting here is that, unlike most every story of this type, Fishman's narrator portrays the protagonist as a straight man, not the butt of the joke. The reader, however, should know better. If you like testosterone-driven, black comedy, and careful language, this book will appeal. This is a skillful, 1960s-style comedy reminiscent of the best of Stanley Elkin.
I note that I avoided reading this book for many months. It goes back to a bad day last October when I was in New York City. On that day, I was told that my own novel (out this fall) would likely go out with zippo marketing (two months later the story was thankfully completely reversed and my novel had lots of support) and was told about Fishman's novel. "It's about a man who writes false Holocaust survivor reports to get money from the German government," someone told me. "It's funny. You'll love it." My stomach sank. I'd just outlined a novel where in a key chapter someone writes a false Holocaust survivor report to get money from the German government. I said, "That's interesting." What I really meant to say was, "Yob tvoyu mat!" I was p.o.'d.
I'm over it now. I'm still going to have my character write a false report in my novel. If someone says, you took that from Fishman's book, though, I just might slug him.
Shlemiel stories are a staple of Jewish literature, but what's interesting here is that, unlike most every story of this type, Fishman's narrator portrays the protagonist as a straight man, not the butt of the joke. The reader, however, should know better. If you like testosterone-driven, black comedy, and careful language, this book will appeal. This is a skillful, 1960s-style comedy reminiscent of the best of Stanley Elkin.
I note that I avoided reading this book for many months. It goes back to a bad day last October when I was in New York City. On that day, I was told that my own novel (out this fall) would likely go out with zippo marketing (two months later the story was thankfully completely reversed and my novel had lots of support) and was told about Fishman's novel. "It's about a man who writes false Holocaust survivor reports to get money from the German government," someone told me. "It's funny. You'll love it." My stomach sank. I'd just outlined a novel where in a key chapter someone writes a false Holocaust survivor report to get money from the German government. I said, "That's interesting." What I really meant to say was, "Yob tvoyu mat!" I was p.o.'d.
I'm over it now. I'm still going to have my character write a false report in my novel. If someone says, you took that from Fishman's book, though, I just might slug him.
December 21, 2014
I discovered two important items while reading this book: 1-Boris Fishman is an extremely gifted writer. 2-I am not a fan of dark comedy.
Fishman is on par with Gary Shteyngart. Both create energetic and diverse characters. Blending humor with serious subject matter isn't easy, yet these two authors have no issues in making the task a success.
Fishman's debut is character driven. He assembled quite a vibrant and exciting cast from varying circumstances. The protagonists range from cantankerous, privileged to sage souls. The immigrant factor adds to the characters as well as the plot.
Fishman's writing feels as if it's animated, vigorous and at times a stream of consciousness. His writing lends texture and dimension. Humor seems to be his forte, there were times I laughed out loud, completely caught off guard. At times his writing was downright emotional revealing his ability to switch gears at a moments notice.
Slava is a character that is all over the place and this detail endears him to the reader. No matter how flawed Slava is somehow Fishman convinces the reader to look past and find a soft spot for this questionable man and you do. Full of sarcasm, this novel clearly points out life's amusing moments.
I enjoyed Fishman's writing despite dark comedy failing to align with my taste. I will read his next novel to satiate my curiosity in seeing if he has ventured out or plans on clinging to dark comedy. Wonderful debut effort, clearly an author with literary talent. A story posing a few questions both trivial and serious, addressing family, honor and justice.
Fishman is on par with Gary Shteyngart. Both create energetic and diverse characters. Blending humor with serious subject matter isn't easy, yet these two authors have no issues in making the task a success.
Fishman's debut is character driven. He assembled quite a vibrant and exciting cast from varying circumstances. The protagonists range from cantankerous, privileged to sage souls. The immigrant factor adds to the characters as well as the plot.
Fishman's writing feels as if it's animated, vigorous and at times a stream of consciousness. His writing lends texture and dimension. Humor seems to be his forte, there were times I laughed out loud, completely caught off guard. At times his writing was downright emotional revealing his ability to switch gears at a moments notice.
Slava is a character that is all over the place and this detail endears him to the reader. No matter how flawed Slava is somehow Fishman convinces the reader to look past and find a soft spot for this questionable man and you do. Full of sarcasm, this novel clearly points out life's amusing moments.
I enjoyed Fishman's writing despite dark comedy failing to align with my taste. I will read his next novel to satiate my curiosity in seeing if he has ventured out or plans on clinging to dark comedy. Wonderful debut effort, clearly an author with literary talent. A story posing a few questions both trivial and serious, addressing family, honor and justice.
June 5, 2014
This book was a unique read. Yes, it has many of the same ingredients of other recent novels: set in NYC, set in the crazy world of magazine publishing, young single 20-something year old characters looking for themselves and reconciling their desires with family expectations. What makes A Replacement Life different is the cast of characters. Characters that span Manhattan elite to Russian immigrants who make their money selling burial plots to fellow immigrants. A Replacement Life is a study on the relationships between different generations and different cultures that can be found within a single family.
I liked Boris Fishman’s writing style immediately. He sees the humor and irony found in so many aspects of day to day living and did not hold back in sharing his main character’s flaws. Yet as flawed as Slava was, I found myself really liking him.
I liked this book. It is definitely dark and covers some serious subjects but Fishman found a way to use humor in just the right places to lighten it up.
*Thank you to TLC Book Tours and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy of this book. My review is an honest reflection of my views on A Replacement Life.
I liked Boris Fishman’s writing style immediately. He sees the humor and irony found in so many aspects of day to day living and did not hold back in sharing his main character’s flaws. Yet as flawed as Slava was, I found myself really liking him.
I liked this book. It is definitely dark and covers some serious subjects but Fishman found a way to use humor in just the right places to lighten it up.
*Thank you to TLC Book Tours and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy of this book. My review is an honest reflection of my views on A Replacement Life.
August 16, 2014
I really wanted to like and admire this book. I think about the tremendous physical and emotional effort the author spent. Years of research? Did he do this at night and on weekends, forsaking his family and community obligations? Or did he quit work and live as a pauper to produce his debut work?
The book has an enticing premise. There is restitution money available for holocaust survivors, but only for a certain kind of survivor: those with the right backstory. Slava, a young magazine writer, is asked by his grandfather to create a "replacement life" to fit the requirements of the restitution offer. After all, "didn't we all suffer?"
The novel is, unfortunately, very uneven and at many times just a chore to keep reading. It took weeks to finish. The best passages are near the end, a few dozen delightful pages for those who persevered.
The book has an enticing premise. There is restitution money available for holocaust survivors, but only for a certain kind of survivor: those with the right backstory. Slava, a young magazine writer, is asked by his grandfather to create a "replacement life" to fit the requirements of the restitution offer. After all, "didn't we all suffer?"
The novel is, unfortunately, very uneven and at many times just a chore to keep reading. It took weeks to finish. The best passages are near the end, a few dozen delightful pages for those who persevered.
October 31, 2014
"You do not notice exactly when day becomes night, but you notice night."
I've been having trouble finishing books; I get bogged down in the middle and can't make it out or through to the end. But I read this without stopping, if slowly--a tribute to the story and the prose.
And Fishman's story is a tribute to our grandparents (or great-grandparents, in my case), who left their homes, which they knew and were attached to (no matter that their survival depended upon going, that it was the wisest and best action) to make a future for us, their descendants.
They came from hardship and faced hardship. They focused on the now and the what-could-be, not the past.
We do not often ask, or listen, for the narratives that connect, bind, and propel them. We are impatient, or oblivious, or ashamed.
Slava has rejected his Russian refugee family, and straddles uneasily his façade of assimilation. But the death of his grandmother and his grandfather's loneliness draw him back with blood and stories. It is not a smooth ride; it leads to half-truths, sorrow, and fear. But also to generosity, connection, and the beginning of understanding.
Fishman's characters are stereotypical in some ways, but they are also individuals with the wry humor necessary to navigate their tangled lives. This is a book where the elderly are given equal status with the young.
Slava wants to do the right thing, and at the same time to follow the rules. But he doesn't know what the rules are: they keep changing. And there is so much he doesn't understand, in all directions, past, present, and future.
And what is right to the heart and soul, as he learns from the sharp knife of experience, knows no rules. In fact the rules are too often useless, and instead block proper action.
"Life is not long....We are so small, Slava. We are always in danger of disappearing because of one thing or another."
Fishman does not provide a resolution for Slava's dilemma of identity. But he gives us a mirror in which to study our own reflections, and to consider our own relationship to those who obscured their pasts to give us our present and future.
I've been having trouble finishing books; I get bogged down in the middle and can't make it out or through to the end. But I read this without stopping, if slowly--a tribute to the story and the prose.
And Fishman's story is a tribute to our grandparents (or great-grandparents, in my case), who left their homes, which they knew and were attached to (no matter that their survival depended upon going, that it was the wisest and best action) to make a future for us, their descendants.
They came from hardship and faced hardship. They focused on the now and the what-could-be, not the past.
We do not often ask, or listen, for the narratives that connect, bind, and propel them. We are impatient, or oblivious, or ashamed.
Slava has rejected his Russian refugee family, and straddles uneasily his façade of assimilation. But the death of his grandmother and his grandfather's loneliness draw him back with blood and stories. It is not a smooth ride; it leads to half-truths, sorrow, and fear. But also to generosity, connection, and the beginning of understanding.
Fishman's characters are stereotypical in some ways, but they are also individuals with the wry humor necessary to navigate their tangled lives. This is a book where the elderly are given equal status with the young.
Slava wants to do the right thing, and at the same time to follow the rules. But he doesn't know what the rules are: they keep changing. And there is so much he doesn't understand, in all directions, past, present, and future.
And what is right to the heart and soul, as he learns from the sharp knife of experience, knows no rules. In fact the rules are too often useless, and instead block proper action.
"Life is not long....We are so small, Slava. We are always in danger of disappearing because of one thing or another."
Fishman does not provide a resolution for Slava's dilemma of identity. But he gives us a mirror in which to study our own reflections, and to consider our own relationship to those who obscured their pasts to give us our present and future.
August 8, 2015
3.0- 3.5 stars
I liked this book-it is as a bit hard to follow at first but the plot & characters picked up. Holocaust survivors both real and contrived seeking reparations from the German government ? A tongue-in-cheek dark comedy? You betcha!
The characters are well developed, their personalities, thoughts, guilt, hopes and conflicts. Slava Geldman works for a publisher & is not a particularly happy person. His hilarious grandfather ropes him in to writing contrived histories for himself and others regarding their experiences during Nazi occupation. Slava's parents want him married, he's trying to connect with his grandmother's unspoken past & he doesn't really like his job. He wants to be a great writer yet, cannot find a style suitable for publishing. Slava finds himself full of literary prose, spinning tales of encampment, horror and sadness when describing "Nazi escapes".
This is not a "haha" funny book. It's clever and the characters are well developed. It's satirical in the bits between Slava & his grandfather, the Yiddish, the extraneous characters. It just took awhile to develop (for me, 1/3 of the book) otherwise would be 4 stars.
I liked this book-it is as a bit hard to follow at first but the plot & characters picked up. Holocaust survivors both real and contrived seeking reparations from the German government ? A tongue-in-cheek dark comedy? You betcha!
The characters are well developed, their personalities, thoughts, guilt, hopes and conflicts. Slava Geldman works for a publisher & is not a particularly happy person. His hilarious grandfather ropes him in to writing contrived histories for himself and others regarding their experiences during Nazi occupation. Slava's parents want him married, he's trying to connect with his grandmother's unspoken past & he doesn't really like his job. He wants to be a great writer yet, cannot find a style suitable for publishing. Slava finds himself full of literary prose, spinning tales of encampment, horror and sadness when describing "Nazi escapes".
This is not a "haha" funny book. It's clever and the characters are well developed. It's satirical in the bits between Slava & his grandfather, the Yiddish, the extraneous characters. It just took awhile to develop (for me, 1/3 of the book) otherwise would be 4 stars.
July 30, 2014
This is a gorgeous debut from one of the most compelling storytellers since Michael Chabon. This book is about everything--life, love, identity, culture, morality, and more.
It is one of the most emotionally compelling and satisfying books I've ever read. There is a richness and a tenderness and a wit to his writing style that is undeniable and irresistible.
"A Replacement Life" is a knockout.
I recall one reviewer saying the first 35 pages dragged on for him. I had quite the opposite experience. Those pages drew me in and kept me there. They threw open a window in my memory of my Russian grandparents and their gatherings, and the joy and love I felt from them (and the food, and the arguing), how they looked at me in a way I only now understand as a parent, and how puzzling and amazing it is be someone who straddles different generations and cultures.
This book melted my heart, broke it, and mended it again and again. What more could a girl ask for?
It is one of the most emotionally compelling and satisfying books I've ever read. There is a richness and a tenderness and a wit to his writing style that is undeniable and irresistible.
"A Replacement Life" is a knockout.
I recall one reviewer saying the first 35 pages dragged on for him. I had quite the opposite experience. Those pages drew me in and kept me there. They threw open a window in my memory of my Russian grandparents and their gatherings, and the joy and love I felt from them (and the food, and the arguing), how they looked at me in a way I only now understand as a parent, and how puzzling and amazing it is be someone who straddles different generations and cultures.
This book melted my heart, broke it, and mended it again and again. What more could a girl ask for?
August 21, 2014
While I had a bit of a hard time reading the broken English, I basically liked this novel because the situations and characters felt real. At the request of his aging manipulative Russian Jewish grandfather, Slava, a struggling writer for a magazine, gets roped into writing letters for the applications of immigrants from the USSR seeking reparations from Germany for their suffering during WWII. The thing is that many of them didn't exactly have the experiences that Slava invents.
The fine shades of truth and morality are major themes here, as is the re-invention of oneself in the process of the being/becoming an American. The impact of friendships and feuds from the old country, the love and respect of parents and grandparents, and the crossing of the cultural divide add to the novel's richness.
The fine shades of truth and morality are major themes here, as is the re-invention of oneself in the process of the being/becoming an American. The impact of friendships and feuds from the old country, the love and respect of parents and grandparents, and the crossing of the cultural divide add to the novel's richness.
April 8, 2014
Well written and quite funny for a novel about Holocaust reparations, this didn't quite work for me. I didn't find the story that compelling and there is a sameness to this kind of male, Jewish, Russian emigre, literary, Brooklynvs Manhattan, sex-obsessed voice.
The more I think about it, the more I think the novel was a bit too baggy and the interesting bits get lost in the ruminating. Maybe a little too fond of itself. Another instance of less would be more.
The more I think about it, the more I think the novel was a bit too baggy and the interesting bits get lost in the ruminating. Maybe a little too fond of itself. Another instance of less would be more.
June 5, 2022
This is a beautiful novel about belonging, death, debt, family, and history. It is a treatise of the internal struggle of migrants who were too young to incorporate the old way of life and too close to their family to absolve it completely. Are we a creation of our past or the sum of our future choices? Do our values lie with our family or, when they clash, our society? Can we re-write the past in a way that re-defines our sense of justice and fairness? These are some of the questions that Fishman's book is trying to answer through his young protagonist in this heartbreaking and humorous account of the life of Soviet diaspora in the US.
Slava Gelman is born in Belarus (then the Soviet Union) and at the age of seven has moved with his parents and grandparents to New York. Growing up in a capitalist setting that upends his cultural values brings him into clash with his family's priorities and way of life. Now in his twenties, having experienced the death of his beloved grandmother, he is presented with a dilemma that will test his allegiance to his origins. As a junior writer on the margins of a prestigious magazine, Slava is asked by his grandfather to write a letter on behalf of him and claim restitution for the Nazi monstrosities beholden on Jewish Eastern European population that spent time in concentration camps during the second World War. So far so good, with the exception that Slava's grandfather is not Jewish, he did not spend any time in a concentration camp, and is of a dubious character where pride, status, machinations, power politics, and deception intercept to reveal the corrupt social network embedded in the Soviet mentality and way of life. Slava's feelings of owning a debt to his grandmother (who did spend some time in a concentration camp) overcome his sense of rightness. He decides to write the letter on behalf of his grandfather and another twenty or so Jews of Russian origins who were not entitled to reparations but were treated as a second tier citizens in the Soviet Union.
In essence, A Replace Life is an account that tries to answer questions of right and wrong, equality, fairness, and justice. It underlines the social discomfort of the inability of the law to meet fairness. The conflict created by this uneasy relationship can not accommodate (or in some cases over-accommodates) cultural and historical practices that have normative values in shaping these questions. Jews in the Soviet Union and the Second World War suffered from the German atrocities. Are they less entitled to German reparations because they did not spend any time in a concentration camp? Who can decide how much each individual have suffered and how much they have offered to their Jewishness? Those who committed crimes or benefited from the suffering of other people, reaping material benefits, should not share their riches? As Slava comments, "a man of means acquires them God knows how and then lectures the man without means about honour. Is it not strange to kill diligently and then commemorate diligently?" (p. 302).
This book belongs to the same category of work where the protagonists are Soviet immigrants that make their way from the fringes of communism to the land of the American Dream, such as Divide Me By Zero by Lara Vapnyar, The Wife Who Wasn't by Alta Ifland, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngard, and Jacob's Ladder by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. However, it it Vapnyar's novel that has more similarities with Fishman's. Both novels feature protagonists who emigrated to America without speaking English but became journalists and university professors of creative writing. Also, both novels feature the theme of losing a beloved family member, a mother and a grandmother respectively. The cultural differences between the communist and capitalist way of life can be summed up by Israel's remark, "back home you can save someone from drawing and you won't get a thank-you, but they will always call you Israel Arkadievich (sign of respect). Here, it's that hai-hava-yoo all the time, but they won't save you if you're drawing." (p. 112).
Slava Gelman is born in Belarus (then the Soviet Union) and at the age of seven has moved with his parents and grandparents to New York. Growing up in a capitalist setting that upends his cultural values brings him into clash with his family's priorities and way of life. Now in his twenties, having experienced the death of his beloved grandmother, he is presented with a dilemma that will test his allegiance to his origins. As a junior writer on the margins of a prestigious magazine, Slava is asked by his grandfather to write a letter on behalf of him and claim restitution for the Nazi monstrosities beholden on Jewish Eastern European population that spent time in concentration camps during the second World War. So far so good, with the exception that Slava's grandfather is not Jewish, he did not spend any time in a concentration camp, and is of a dubious character where pride, status, machinations, power politics, and deception intercept to reveal the corrupt social network embedded in the Soviet mentality and way of life. Slava's feelings of owning a debt to his grandmother (who did spend some time in a concentration camp) overcome his sense of rightness. He decides to write the letter on behalf of his grandfather and another twenty or so Jews of Russian origins who were not entitled to reparations but were treated as a second tier citizens in the Soviet Union.
In essence, A Replace Life is an account that tries to answer questions of right and wrong, equality, fairness, and justice. It underlines the social discomfort of the inability of the law to meet fairness. The conflict created by this uneasy relationship can not accommodate (or in some cases over-accommodates) cultural and historical practices that have normative values in shaping these questions. Jews in the Soviet Union and the Second World War suffered from the German atrocities. Are they less entitled to German reparations because they did not spend any time in a concentration camp? Who can decide how much each individual have suffered and how much they have offered to their Jewishness? Those who committed crimes or benefited from the suffering of other people, reaping material benefits, should not share their riches? As Slava comments, "a man of means acquires them God knows how and then lectures the man without means about honour. Is it not strange to kill diligently and then commemorate diligently?" (p. 302).
This book belongs to the same category of work where the protagonists are Soviet immigrants that make their way from the fringes of communism to the land of the American Dream, such as Divide Me By Zero by Lara Vapnyar, The Wife Who Wasn't by Alta Ifland, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngard, and Jacob's Ladder by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. However, it it Vapnyar's novel that has more similarities with Fishman's. Both novels feature protagonists who emigrated to America without speaking English but became journalists and university professors of creative writing. Also, both novels feature the theme of losing a beloved family member, a mother and a grandmother respectively. The cultural differences between the communist and capitalist way of life can be summed up by Israel's remark, "back home you can save someone from drawing and you won't get a thank-you, but they will always call you Israel Arkadievich (sign of respect). Here, it's that hai-hava-yoo all the time, but they won't save you if you're drawing." (p. 112).
November 4, 2015
[ARC via Amazon Vine program]
Slava Gelman is a young writer trying to get a foothold on the slippery slope from low-ranking nobody to published writer, with a byline in Century, a high-profile magazine where he works. So far achieving little respect, his ideas largely overlooked, he’s mired in frustration. If he’s to succeed, he believes he needs to break free of his barely off the boat Russian family, moving forward into modern-day Manhattan and the new lifestyle he yearns to emulate.
Upon the death of his much-loved grandmother, his adorable grandfather – a golden-hearted man thoroughly lacking principle in all matters related to money – convinces Slava he should turn his writing skills to the family’s advantage, forging a letter of restitution for his grandmother’s suffering during the Holocaust, in order to receive money from the German government. Along with the request, Slava finds himself reeled back into the bosom of the family, adding to his conflict and misery.
What makes the whole endeavor a bit less smarmy is his grandmother just missed a legitimate opportunity to apply for restitution; she missed the letter which would have qualified her by just a few days. The implied question is: is it more immoral forging a letter to get money from a government formerly responsible for the killing of thousands of Jews, or to allow this same government to get away with not having compensated the family in any way – not that money can buy back what suffering takes.
Moral or not, Slava writes the letter. In so doing, he gets far more than he ever bargained for, which you kind of have to figure or there’d be no story, would there?
Fishman’s book takes on a very serious topic, managing to sidestep the most serious offense through use of humor, mixed with a cast of characters you can’t fail to love . Will his treatment of forged Holocaust restitution offend some readers or make Slava heroic? Tough to say.
Though I am not Jewish, I am a human being whose heart hurt reading Slava’s invented stories. Not having read other reviews of the book, I can’t say how he fared with other readers. I was borderline, finding a few more gruesome details a little too graphic for comfort. But then, as is always the case in reading fiction written by a writer representing a culture foreign to the reader, I feel a bit reluctant speaking out against his treatment. I have no notion how it feels to have been savaged at the hands of the Nazis. What I know comes from history books, films and other literature I read. My heart breaks on their behalf but I will always be an outsider.
For the most part, I found Fishman’s balance between horror and humor even. The specter of very real suffering was in the background throughout the book; it isn’t as if he moved from funny to savage with no segue. His own Russian Jewish heritage came through strongly, his heart clearly affected by the story he chose to tell.
A Replacement Life reads similarly to the books of Gary Shteyngart, funny by use of understated, ironic humor. There’s a good chance if you enjoy one, you’ll enjoy the other writer.
Russian Jewish humor has a distinctly unique inflection. Plots often verge on the madcap, heavily using old word vs. new world contrast to create distinct generational separation in characters, lending itself well to this type of humor. Older family members groan and hold their heads over new world changes in the young, invoking guilt in an attempt to bring the younger generation back to the old ways. Of course, they generally fail. Once having achieved freedom, who wants to trade it back?
Loved the book. Highly recommend.
From Acknowledgments:
“My first thanks is to my grandmother. She really was better than all of us.
Then to my grandfather. A friend once said, “You’re smarter than him, you’re more enlightened than him. But both of us can fit inside his left nut.” Hard to Argue.”
Slava Gelman is a young writer trying to get a foothold on the slippery slope from low-ranking nobody to published writer, with a byline in Century, a high-profile magazine where he works. So far achieving little respect, his ideas largely overlooked, he’s mired in frustration. If he’s to succeed, he believes he needs to break free of his barely off the boat Russian family, moving forward into modern-day Manhattan and the new lifestyle he yearns to emulate.
Upon the death of his much-loved grandmother, his adorable grandfather – a golden-hearted man thoroughly lacking principle in all matters related to money – convinces Slava he should turn his writing skills to the family’s advantage, forging a letter of restitution for his grandmother’s suffering during the Holocaust, in order to receive money from the German government. Along with the request, Slava finds himself reeled back into the bosom of the family, adding to his conflict and misery.
What makes the whole endeavor a bit less smarmy is his grandmother just missed a legitimate opportunity to apply for restitution; she missed the letter which would have qualified her by just a few days. The implied question is: is it more immoral forging a letter to get money from a government formerly responsible for the killing of thousands of Jews, or to allow this same government to get away with not having compensated the family in any way – not that money can buy back what suffering takes.
Moral or not, Slava writes the letter. In so doing, he gets far more than he ever bargained for, which you kind of have to figure or there’d be no story, would there?
Fishman’s book takes on a very serious topic, managing to sidestep the most serious offense through use of humor, mixed with a cast of characters you can’t fail to love . Will his treatment of forged Holocaust restitution offend some readers or make Slava heroic? Tough to say.
Though I am not Jewish, I am a human being whose heart hurt reading Slava’s invented stories. Not having read other reviews of the book, I can’t say how he fared with other readers. I was borderline, finding a few more gruesome details a little too graphic for comfort. But then, as is always the case in reading fiction written by a writer representing a culture foreign to the reader, I feel a bit reluctant speaking out against his treatment. I have no notion how it feels to have been savaged at the hands of the Nazis. What I know comes from history books, films and other literature I read. My heart breaks on their behalf but I will always be an outsider.
For the most part, I found Fishman’s balance between horror and humor even. The specter of very real suffering was in the background throughout the book; it isn’t as if he moved from funny to savage with no segue. His own Russian Jewish heritage came through strongly, his heart clearly affected by the story he chose to tell.
A Replacement Life reads similarly to the books of Gary Shteyngart, funny by use of understated, ironic humor. There’s a good chance if you enjoy one, you’ll enjoy the other writer.
Russian Jewish humor has a distinctly unique inflection. Plots often verge on the madcap, heavily using old word vs. new world contrast to create distinct generational separation in characters, lending itself well to this type of humor. Older family members groan and hold their heads over new world changes in the young, invoking guilt in an attempt to bring the younger generation back to the old ways. Of course, they generally fail. Once having achieved freedom, who wants to trade it back?
Loved the book. Highly recommend.
From Acknowledgments:
“My first thanks is to my grandmother. She really was better than all of us.
Then to my grandfather. A friend once said, “You’re smarter than him, you’re more enlightened than him. But both of us can fit inside his left nut.” Hard to Argue.”
July 4, 2016
Read my review on New York Journal of Books. Read that review first. Additional remarks that appeared in a different and now defunct publication begin with the next paragraph.
Meet Boris Fishman the newest star novelist of the Little Odessa Renaissance
With the publication this week of his debut novel A Replacement Life by New York based publisher HarperCollins Boris Fishman joins the ranks of fellow writers of The Little Odessa Renaissance who immigrated from the Soviet Union to The United States and Canada as children including Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmogis, Anya Ulinich, Nadia Kalman, and Ellen Litman all of whom explore the theme of having one foot in Russian and the other in American culture.
Fishman’s protagonist Slava Gelman is an aspiring writer who fabricates Holocaust narratives for fraudulent reparation applications on behalf of Russian Jewish immigrants of his grandparents’ generation. In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I write, “Slava knows that to make his stories convincing he has to get the details right, and despite the leaps of faith Fishman demands he provides more than enough correct details and well crafted figurative turns of phrase to convince most readers to go along with him—and those who do will be amply rewarded by this multidimensional and handsomely written debut novel.”
I really enjoyed reading A Replacement Life, but besides “the leaps of faith” my other reservation concerns the way Fishman portrays his fellow immigrants from the former Soviet Union as a community of liars and cheats. I hope that defamatory characterization is an overly broad generalization. For a more detailed discussion of the novel read my New York Journal of Books review.
Meet Boris Fishman the newest star novelist of the Little Odessa Renaissance
With the publication this week of his debut novel A Replacement Life by New York based publisher HarperCollins Boris Fishman joins the ranks of fellow writers of The Little Odessa Renaissance who immigrated from the Soviet Union to The United States and Canada as children including Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmogis, Anya Ulinich, Nadia Kalman, and Ellen Litman all of whom explore the theme of having one foot in Russian and the other in American culture.
Fishman’s protagonist Slava Gelman is an aspiring writer who fabricates Holocaust narratives for fraudulent reparation applications on behalf of Russian Jewish immigrants of his grandparents’ generation. In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I write, “Slava knows that to make his stories convincing he has to get the details right, and despite the leaps of faith Fishman demands he provides more than enough correct details and well crafted figurative turns of phrase to convince most readers to go along with him—and those who do will be amply rewarded by this multidimensional and handsomely written debut novel.”
I really enjoyed reading A Replacement Life, but besides “the leaps of faith” my other reservation concerns the way Fishman portrays his fellow immigrants from the former Soviet Union as a community of liars and cheats. I hope that defamatory characterization is an overly broad generalization. For a more detailed discussion of the novel read my New York Journal of Books review.
July 7, 2014
I loved this book. I often judge my love for books by the frequency I stop reading and stare into space in reflection and awe. I won't summarize the plot of the book as both the publisher's note and others' reviews have done it well enough. Here are a few things that I've been struck and touched by. Despite all the machination and moral juggling, I found the character of the grandfather extremely sympathetic and even tragic. He's a bit like an aged Ostap Bender from Ilf and Petrov's classic "The Golden Calf": there is a deep human tragedy behind all of grandfather's bravado and one-upmanship, not just because so many of his family members perished in the Holocaust or World War II (that too, of course), but also because he can never stop with his scheming, he can never truly relax, he can never change. He's like that gambler or gangster going in for one last game or robbery and another last one, this time, definitely, the very last one.
Slava, too, is an interesting, sympathetic guide into the world of New York publishing as well as Soviet Brooklyn. His moral dilemmas are laid out clearly, his thoughts traced eloquently. Reading, I couldn't help but wonder: what would I do in his place?
The book is full of small thrills: descriptions of people, gestures, morning sky and night sky, and relationships, particularly between Slava and his love interest, Arianna, as well as Slava and his grandfather. I loved descriptions of New York, which were so true, so exact, so vivid. It was a pleasure to re-visit the city of my youth through this novel.
The writing is a treat for language lovers, very reminiscent of Aleksandar Hemon.
Slava, too, is an interesting, sympathetic guide into the world of New York publishing as well as Soviet Brooklyn. His moral dilemmas are laid out clearly, his thoughts traced eloquently. Reading, I couldn't help but wonder: what would I do in his place?
The book is full of small thrills: descriptions of people, gestures, morning sky and night sky, and relationships, particularly between Slava and his love interest, Arianna, as well as Slava and his grandfather. I loved descriptions of New York, which were so true, so exact, so vivid. It was a pleasure to re-visit the city of my youth through this novel.
The writing is a treat for language lovers, very reminiscent of Aleksandar Hemon.
February 9, 2015
Tender, sweet, funny and heart wrenching. This is a story of a young man, Slava, caught between his Russian Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn and his desire to assimilate into American culture. Boris Fishman is a master when it comes to writing about the Russian Jewish community. "Your grandmother isn't, she said. She burst into tears. Isn't. Verbiage was missing. In Russian you didn't need the adjective to complete the sentence, but in English you did. In English she could still be alive". And his description of his grandfather's housekeeper, Berta : "Like a Soviet high-rise, each floor of Berta was stuffed beyond capacity". He leaves his roots to become a writer at a magazine very much like the New Yorker (for which the author has written). But his style of writing does not fit in with the style of the magazine so he never gets feature articles. When his Grandmother dies, he returns to Brooklyn and so we see that rich culture described so beautifully by Mr. Fishman (who is a Russian Jewish immigrant himself). You fall in love with these people and their crazy un-American ways. You feel for Slava, trying to decide where he fits in. And the stories of these immigrants lives in Russia during the war pull at your heart. When Slava visits his grandmother's grave at the end of the book, I cried - tears running down my cheeks. I don't remember the last time a book made me feel this way. Absolutely worth 5 stars.. maybe even more.
January 19, 2015
I really liked this book. It was almost Shteyngart-ian, if that's a real thing that I didn't just make up. The story centers around a Russian immigrant in New York working at a renown literary magazine confronting the past of his grandparents and the past of history. The narrator skillfully walks between the Eastern European dialects of Brooklyn and the pre-hipster literati of Manhattan.
"Like a Soviet high-rise, each floor of Berta was stuffed beyond capacity. SIlver polish gleamed from her toe, wedged into platforms she was using as house slipper; flower-print capri tights encased in a death grip the meat-rack haunch of her legs. Slava felt a treacherous lurch in his groin."
If you think you can detect a bit of Portnoy, Philip Roth, you are probably right. But Fishman's writing is visceral but not sexualized the way Roth is. His sentences are intricate without being showy. There's a nice morality theme that lightly hangs over the multiple dualities he sets up, right and wrong, suffering and restitution, old and young, manhattan and brooklyn, Jew and gentile, without being too heavy handed. I look forward to his next one.
"Like a Soviet high-rise, each floor of Berta was stuffed beyond capacity. SIlver polish gleamed from her toe, wedged into platforms she was using as house slipper; flower-print capri tights encased in a death grip the meat-rack haunch of her legs. Slava felt a treacherous lurch in his groin."
If you think you can detect a bit of Portnoy, Philip Roth, you are probably right. But Fishman's writing is visceral but not sexualized the way Roth is. His sentences are intricate without being showy. There's a nice morality theme that lightly hangs over the multiple dualities he sets up, right and wrong, suffering and restitution, old and young, manhattan and brooklyn, Jew and gentile, without being too heavy handed. I look forward to his next one.
October 19, 2024
Around the time of his grandmother’s death, Slava Gelman’s grandparents received a letter from an agency in Germany that is paying reparations to people who were incarcerated in concentration camps, ghettos, and forced labor battalions. The whole family knows that Mrs. Gelman lived in the Minsk Ghetto, but they don’t know much more than that. She never spoke of it. But her husband, Yevgeny, decides that Slava can write back to this agency claiming that he (Yevgeny) was in the ghetto. Yevgeny suffered, too, he argues, and the Germans were responsible. This is where Boris Fishman’s ethically sticky novel, A Replacement Life, begins. Unfortunately for Slava, things get even more complicated after this...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
June 24, 2014
This book is awesome. I bought it on Thursday, had it finished by Monday night--which for me, means I was addicted. Of course, it helps that the main character was a 25-year-old Russian Jewish writer with whom I became, for a few days, obsessed. The writing is tremendous, the pathos is compelling; I would have given five stars, except I tend to reserve that rating for things a bit heavier in philosophy. Anyone who speaks Russian will delights in the morsels of that tongue that are thrown in. This book is "rodnaya", all the way. Be sure to read the notes at the back to see where Fishman lifted phrases directly from Dostoevsky--he demonstrates that we shouldn't be afraid to learn from the best.
May 18, 2015
A very fine debut, rife with compassion and dark humor. To me it's evident how much hard work Fishman put into it, that the book is so structurally sound and has some truly memorable great flashing lines, a most crucial facet of literature. I love that it has these meta- themes, of the stories-within-the-story, the blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction, with a heartfelt depth via Slava, the protagonist. I highly enjoyed the entire trajectory of the Arianna relationship, and how Slava's hangups with his family and community ties spill over into his intimate life (because don't they always?) What does it mean to be an American? I'm fascinated by that.
September 6, 2016
"The letter, this new life, had taken all of forty-five minutes. What the Nazis took away, Slava restored. He carried numbers on a pad of paper: Doing this for every person they killed would take 513 years without stopping. Reading over the letter, he felt satisfaction mixed with unease. On the page, it was Grandmother but also not-Grandmother. He couldn't say why, despite rereading the letter several times. Finally, he gave up, double-checked that it included no references to the applicant's gender, and entered his grandfather's name at the top." (page 90.)
Still thinking about Slava Gelman and his family.
Still thinking about Slava Gelman and his family.
September 8, 2014
Great book with some very thought provoking themes about the grey line between truth and fiction when faced with moral dilemma. I thought there could have been some better character development of Arianna and Vera as juxtaposed love interests. I also enjoyed background info on the people Slava helped and felt like it was often cut off too quickly. I found some parts a quick flow and very engaging while others slower and tangential. Overall an enjoyable read.
June 28, 2014
Anyone ever read David Sedaris' article about visiting the Anne Frank house and coming to the realization that it was prime real estate? Edgy article - almost over the edge of good taste. But not quite.
July 17, 2014
I found the beginning of this book (maybe first 50 pages) to be a little slow but when it picked up I really loved it. Slava is flawed for sure, but lovable and the remaining cast of characters made for some good laughs. Very well done.
May 26, 2015
Wow. This is great. Boris Fishman has nailed it with this, his first novel. Smart, incisive, and funny. Love it.
August 5, 2014
Didn't like story...didn't like writing...didn't care about any of the characters
August 17, 2015
Good writing, but somehow too cerebral and not affecting. And this from someone who knows South Brooklyn and knows many Russian immigrants (my summer community.)
October 4, 2025
Reread for conference paper.
March 23, 2015
Most of all, I think A Replacement Life earns the classification “literary” because at those very moments when so many novels approach real emotion and then flinch away and hide behind a mask of irony and jest--when they flirt with a deep question only to then crack a witty joke and nothing more--this book continues on into gravitas. Instead of just the protagonist’s “inappropriate” reactions at a funeral, which does give us good humor, we also have the Minsk narratives and the Q&A with the dead at the end. Instead of just a hilarious, Crime & Punishment-style investigator, we have a difficult moral choice, along with how different kinds of privilege (Slava’s and Arianna’s) inform that choice; true to form, Slava chooses what many in privilege choose in such situations: self-abnegation for a perceived greater good, a thing one can do usually only when one can *afford* to do so--very much unlike many of Slava’s forebears. Also, very touchingly, instead of just pop-off-the-page, funny old men, we have fading old patriarchs of the old world who, for all their problems, earn the reader’s love in droves. Yes, that’s it--the author’s love for these characters comes through again and again. Their incredibly realistic dialogue, their intensely coherent personalities, their struggles, the way Grandfather says something aggravating but then just takes Slava’s hand and says “I love you” at the end, the way Israel has a plethora of cans of beans to eat, the way Lazar Rudinsky’s kitchen is filled with the aura of an old original G, the way the same man worships in his own way but still in public--it’s all really evident, all *very* yellow-shoes believable.
(As a side note, less I be misunderstood, I of course think that humor is a part of high art. I think irony and jest are wonderful. I am only complaining here of the substitution of laughs and thigh-slapping intellectualism for a head-on exploration of the deepest issues. The heaviness of the knowledge of death. The inheritance of tragedy. Identity when it seems the big battles were fought by one’s predecessors. The deployment of logos and academic speak where vulnerability and vulnerability alone is called for. This is what I’m complaining about. Why is it a big deal to me? Because it’s not correct words or smart irony but human connection that counts when things are at their worst. The kind of things Toni Morrison, Tolstoy, and Twain never flinch away from but just charge right to the center, yes armed with humor but also with courage. But I digress…)
I also love how A Replacement Life brings to its subject a sharp acuity of observation, consistently conveyed in what the author calls in his back-of-the-book interview “lapidary” prose. I love it when fiction captures something most of us never put into words. I mean those pleasure-burst moments (to paraphrase Darin Strauss) when we read things like, “Would you believe my story about the tea if I had not said _yellow_ shoes?” The “molecularly satisfying” routine of following instructions. How when “the worst was in” one can “get down to dealing with it.” Or “a leery face with smoked-out eyes.” The entire paragraph about the elderly “willing to talk about their valorous actions” with “twilight upon them.” How at “twenty-five, you had every question answered already” back in Russia. The “ever wearier wakefulness.” The ultramarine makeup that lends “a wanton appearance to a face that seemed still young and unformed.” The hard side of Grandfather’s face that “Slava had been sheltered from.” Thoughts that keep “refusing to snag on some brain branch and bloom.” Feeling “too old for grudges” that “kills me more than the other person.” The “tumbleweeds of chest hair.” The “nervy sheet of the river.” “Why was he here--to be with her or merely without himself?” “The bar drinkers were undermining their noble solitude by staring into the blue screens of cell phones.” A “dancing style” that “involved a perennial look of surprise.” “In America…love did not require nightsticks.” The “oval cameo” of a sleeping face.
These are especially good when Fishman turns the prose camera onto his characters, both individuals and collectives-as-characters, like the neighborhoods of South Brooklyn, the furniture stores, the squeezing of blood out of the concrete of this hard life (paraphrasing here). How “some people can’t stop working over their tragic mistakes,” how a table breaks into “careful laughter” when someone at the epicenter of a loss gives it permission to do so, how there’s a “doleful corollary” of emotional balance to the permission to become carnal with Arianna. Was Weidt “first a devoted Nazi or a Nazi who had fallen in love”? Or look at how “Grandmother only became more unknown” while “Arianna became more unfamiliar.” How “in 1941…to Grandmother, the world must have felt like the final version of itself.” Because Fishman’s characters are realized, this prose spotlighting feels especially justified for them.
I think this kind of writing is valuable not just because it’s difficult to achieve or because of the many, many pages of reading that must go into a single page of this kind of prose, but because it helps us see our myopic blind spots. Helps bring into focus those things that exist in the blur outside of our stock expressions and facile use of automatic words and makes us *see* what has always been in our periphery. It turns our heads left and right, turns our eyes to what is important but difficult to notice. It asks us to be precise with our thoughts. Most of all, it makes us less lonely. When a piece of fiction posits a narrator who has noticed things the reader has also noticed, but in a fresh way, or when the narrator puts into words what the reader has never been able to put into words before, that “OH!” moment on the reader’s part is the brief exorcism of solitude. It lets the mind know it is not alone, that there are others who also see what it sees and others who see what it does not see. It’s part of why I suspect many readers enjoy fiction in the first place.
The novel’s love triangle, which forms part of the page-turning aspects of the book, also feels real. As soon as it seems like it might “go by the numbers,” some new situation (a party, the letters, a drink on a balcony) arises that makes the stakes higher than merely the choosing one of two people but something tied to Slava’s very identity. To me, Slava is in a state of transition. He hasn’t yet become who he is going to be. His choice between Arianna and Vera feels like it will greatly inform what kind of man he’ll become and where his allegiances will lie as he grows into more of an adult (“more of an adult” being that stage when one is no longer responsible merely for one’s self but for more and more others as well). Perhaps because the love triangle is inextricably bound up with a roots-versus-assimilation, origins-versus-America/NYC binary, Slava is fated to choose Arianna *and lose her at the same time*. This conclusion feels both unexpected and yet inevitable for the young man standing on so many shoulders.
Indeed, by standing on those shoulders, Slava is allowed to have second/third generation, upwardly mobile concerns, from being the little golden boy whose forebears put their “hands…in the dirt” so he wouldn’t have to, whose “adults got quiet” when he opened his mouth at the table…for whom the “waters part as if for a king” when he needs to get to writing, etc. This makes for a fascinating protagonist who is struggling to reconcile--to morally question--what to do with both the privileges and the struggles he has inherited. Most centrally, that struggle centers on whether to fake the Holocaust restitution claims. It also revolves around those aspects of Slava’s life where privilege intersects with a different kind of high-on-Maslow’s-triangle struggle, like how to find one’s identity with outsized personalities standing right behind and before him (Grandfather the rock, Grandmother the medusa who killed an infant with a stare, and so many others). On a more submerged, narrative level, there is also a fascinating struggle about how to try (and inevitably fail) to push through the toxic masculinity in a male-dominated world, and more.
Finally, I’m sure people have made mention of how Slava’s fading struggle to gain prominence at Century feels like a meditation on art itself. His structural analysis of the styles that work in print, that work in memory, that work in persuading, that work as a call to action, that work as a cinematic narrative, that work to form identity: his and the other characters’ ruminations on these questions invite even a casual reader to think in a meta level about the very account said reader is reading. The Droste effect we have of how meta this can get has a great many self-swallowing iterations, and it plays out as more than merely “smart” but also emotionally moving, especially when we get to how those very narratives have informed/will inform who Slava is/will become, how those narratives form the umbilical cord back to the past, how they inform history in the personal and very pubic sense. This comes through powerfully when the WWII accounts of Minsk intermix with Slava’s inner search for his dead grandmother. Indeed, for me, the book is about that search for those who we’ve lost and a reaching out to those who will lose us.
(As a side note, less I be misunderstood, I of course think that humor is a part of high art. I think irony and jest are wonderful. I am only complaining here of the substitution of laughs and thigh-slapping intellectualism for a head-on exploration of the deepest issues. The heaviness of the knowledge of death. The inheritance of tragedy. Identity when it seems the big battles were fought by one’s predecessors. The deployment of logos and academic speak where vulnerability and vulnerability alone is called for. This is what I’m complaining about. Why is it a big deal to me? Because it’s not correct words or smart irony but human connection that counts when things are at their worst. The kind of things Toni Morrison, Tolstoy, and Twain never flinch away from but just charge right to the center, yes armed with humor but also with courage. But I digress…)
I also love how A Replacement Life brings to its subject a sharp acuity of observation, consistently conveyed in what the author calls in his back-of-the-book interview “lapidary” prose. I love it when fiction captures something most of us never put into words. I mean those pleasure-burst moments (to paraphrase Darin Strauss) when we read things like, “Would you believe my story about the tea if I had not said _yellow_ shoes?” The “molecularly satisfying” routine of following instructions. How when “the worst was in” one can “get down to dealing with it.” Or “a leery face with smoked-out eyes.” The entire paragraph about the elderly “willing to talk about their valorous actions” with “twilight upon them.” How at “twenty-five, you had every question answered already” back in Russia. The “ever wearier wakefulness.” The ultramarine makeup that lends “a wanton appearance to a face that seemed still young and unformed.” The hard side of Grandfather’s face that “Slava had been sheltered from.” Thoughts that keep “refusing to snag on some brain branch and bloom.” Feeling “too old for grudges” that “kills me more than the other person.” The “tumbleweeds of chest hair.” The “nervy sheet of the river.” “Why was he here--to be with her or merely without himself?” “The bar drinkers were undermining their noble solitude by staring into the blue screens of cell phones.” A “dancing style” that “involved a perennial look of surprise.” “In America…love did not require nightsticks.” The “oval cameo” of a sleeping face.
These are especially good when Fishman turns the prose camera onto his characters, both individuals and collectives-as-characters, like the neighborhoods of South Brooklyn, the furniture stores, the squeezing of blood out of the concrete of this hard life (paraphrasing here). How “some people can’t stop working over their tragic mistakes,” how a table breaks into “careful laughter” when someone at the epicenter of a loss gives it permission to do so, how there’s a “doleful corollary” of emotional balance to the permission to become carnal with Arianna. Was Weidt “first a devoted Nazi or a Nazi who had fallen in love”? Or look at how “Grandmother only became more unknown” while “Arianna became more unfamiliar.” How “in 1941…to Grandmother, the world must have felt like the final version of itself.” Because Fishman’s characters are realized, this prose spotlighting feels especially justified for them.
I think this kind of writing is valuable not just because it’s difficult to achieve or because of the many, many pages of reading that must go into a single page of this kind of prose, but because it helps us see our myopic blind spots. Helps bring into focus those things that exist in the blur outside of our stock expressions and facile use of automatic words and makes us *see* what has always been in our periphery. It turns our heads left and right, turns our eyes to what is important but difficult to notice. It asks us to be precise with our thoughts. Most of all, it makes us less lonely. When a piece of fiction posits a narrator who has noticed things the reader has also noticed, but in a fresh way, or when the narrator puts into words what the reader has never been able to put into words before, that “OH!” moment on the reader’s part is the brief exorcism of solitude. It lets the mind know it is not alone, that there are others who also see what it sees and others who see what it does not see. It’s part of why I suspect many readers enjoy fiction in the first place.
The novel’s love triangle, which forms part of the page-turning aspects of the book, also feels real. As soon as it seems like it might “go by the numbers,” some new situation (a party, the letters, a drink on a balcony) arises that makes the stakes higher than merely the choosing one of two people but something tied to Slava’s very identity. To me, Slava is in a state of transition. He hasn’t yet become who he is going to be. His choice between Arianna and Vera feels like it will greatly inform what kind of man he’ll become and where his allegiances will lie as he grows into more of an adult (“more of an adult” being that stage when one is no longer responsible merely for one’s self but for more and more others as well). Perhaps because the love triangle is inextricably bound up with a roots-versus-assimilation, origins-versus-America/NYC binary, Slava is fated to choose Arianna *and lose her at the same time*. This conclusion feels both unexpected and yet inevitable for the young man standing on so many shoulders.
Indeed, by standing on those shoulders, Slava is allowed to have second/third generation, upwardly mobile concerns, from being the little golden boy whose forebears put their “hands…in the dirt” so he wouldn’t have to, whose “adults got quiet” when he opened his mouth at the table…for whom the “waters part as if for a king” when he needs to get to writing, etc. This makes for a fascinating protagonist who is struggling to reconcile--to morally question--what to do with both the privileges and the struggles he has inherited. Most centrally, that struggle centers on whether to fake the Holocaust restitution claims. It also revolves around those aspects of Slava’s life where privilege intersects with a different kind of high-on-Maslow’s-triangle struggle, like how to find one’s identity with outsized personalities standing right behind and before him (Grandfather the rock, Grandmother the medusa who killed an infant with a stare, and so many others). On a more submerged, narrative level, there is also a fascinating struggle about how to try (and inevitably fail) to push through the toxic masculinity in a male-dominated world, and more.
Finally, I’m sure people have made mention of how Slava’s fading struggle to gain prominence at Century feels like a meditation on art itself. His structural analysis of the styles that work in print, that work in memory, that work in persuading, that work as a call to action, that work as a cinematic narrative, that work to form identity: his and the other characters’ ruminations on these questions invite even a casual reader to think in a meta level about the very account said reader is reading. The Droste effect we have of how meta this can get has a great many self-swallowing iterations, and it plays out as more than merely “smart” but also emotionally moving, especially when we get to how those very narratives have informed/will inform who Slava is/will become, how those narratives form the umbilical cord back to the past, how they inform history in the personal and very pubic sense. This comes through powerfully when the WWII accounts of Minsk intermix with Slava’s inner search for his dead grandmother. Indeed, for me, the book is about that search for those who we’ve lost and a reaching out to those who will lose us.
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June 4, 2014My review in Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.pr...
Slava Gelman’s greatest misfortune, one might surmise, was to have been born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. His family migrated from Minsk, in Soviet Belarus, to the United States when he was a child; old enough to remember the old country, he was yet young enough – fool enough, perhaps – to believe he could escape its baleful influence on his life.
Fat chance. Like it or not, he was trapped between two worlds. He could only envy the effortless ease with which others surrendered themselves to New York. As for Minsk, unlike his parents and grandparents, he had no sentimental connection, other than an “unfocused fear of bodily harm,” because he was a Jew. That and his memory of the scent of the lilac trees that filled the yard.
“A Replacement Life,” the debut novel by Boris Fishman – born in Minsk in 1979, emigrated to the United States in 1988 – is an unusual book. Meditations on migration and the curious half-life that ensues are thick on the ground, and of variable quality. (There is, of course, an established school of Soviet Jewish American migrant fiction, whose faculty include Lara Vapnyar, David Bezmozgis and, most notably, Gary Shteyngart.) Most try to shine an honest – if not always fulsomely positive – light on the tribulations of relocation. But “A Replacement Life” stands out, not least for its exceptional candor, and the machinations that shape the plot. Of course, it would be pretty hard to cast sympathetic light on an attempt to defraud the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
It is worth keeping in mind that there is a real-life counterpart to this, dating back a couple of years, when Russian-speaking Jewish migrants employed by the Conference conspired to siphon off $42 million of funds intended for distribution to Holocaust survivors.
But let’s go back to Slava. When we first meet Fishman’s (sort-of) anti-hero, he is perched precariously between two incompatible worlds. He fancies himself as a writer, an erudite man of letters; but he is stuck in an anonymous junior position at Century, an upmarket literary periodical. (Any resemblance to The New Yorker, where Fishman himself once worked as a fact checker one assumes, is purely un-coincidental.)
Slava holds the journal and its supercilious values in the highest regard; unsurprisingly, his desire for total assimilation into America sublimates into a quest – on the whole, quixotic – to score a coveted writing commission for the magazine. The problem is that Slava can’t quite manage to crack the code that will permit him to believe that he belongs.
It’s a question of his antecedents, he thinks, rooted in the working-class Soviet emigre community of south Brooklyn. He has to do everything he can do to make it seem that he belongs to the real America, not its ugly stepbrother immigrant counterpart. Slava can run from Russian-language coarseness and blue-collar chicanery if he chooses; he’ll never manage to hide from it though, especially if it comes chasing after him.
Particularly unsympathetic is grandfather Yevgeny, hard as nails and particularly attuned to the opportunities available to sharp-elbowed men on the make. He is not impressed by Slava’s attempts to craft himself as a man of letters. Men should live by their wits and not their words, whether in America or elsewhere. “This country does not invent things?” Yevgeny demands of Slava. “Bush did not invent a reason to cut off Saddam’s balls? When the stocks fall down, it’s not because someone invented the numbers?”
There are many routes to achieving the immigrant’s American Dream, it seems. After Yevgeny’s wife – Slava’s grandmother – dies, Slava is half-shamed, half-bullied into putting his writing skills to what Yevgeny determines is a more practical goal. According to the Claims Conference, Yevgeny didn’t “suffer the right way” to qualify for restitution paid to survivors of the Holocaust. So why not spin a story that will fit the bill?
Facts are curious things, much more arbitrary than we readily acknowledge. Fishman works this ambiguity astutely in setting the scene for “A Replacement Life.” Even those of us – most of us, I assume – who would shudder at the notion of defrauding the Claims Conference would admit that the definition of “victim” can seem, at best, somewhat rigid. Restitution goes only to those who were “incarcerated in concentration camps, ghettos or forced labor battalions.”
That’s not Yevgeny, whose unerring sense of self-preservation saved him from the worst of the war. But not from the banality of everyday anti-Semitism afterward. Facts are just a convenient subset of the fiction genre, and Yevgeny has convinced himself that he is as deserving as the next victim.
Slava the writer is going to put his skills to good use for a change; Yevgeny tasks him with crafting a convincing narrative to submit to the Claims Conference.
Artificial bifurcations
“A Replacement Life” is an ambitious, insistently clever book. A recurring refrain is the artificial bifurcations that distort our engagement with everyday life. There’s the American/not-American dichotomy (also, in its own way, a hierarchy); there’s the vexed issue of who is called, or gets to be called, a Holocaust survivor. Fishman works this theme further into Slava’s life. Given his gaucheness, he improbably tumbles into a relationship with Arianna, an elegant and sophisticated fact-checker at Century. Arianna is Jewish, too, but of much older immigrant stock; Slava can only but envy her comfortable assimilation into her milieu.
Then there’s Vera, the daughter of pre-migration family friends but still resolutely non-American, who turns up unexpectedly at Slava’s grandmother’s shivah (seven-day period of mourning). When the two were children, the joke was that they were the perfect couple-in-the-making. Two decades on, it seems that Vera still thinks this to be true. The two women are as alike as chalk and cheese: Arianna might be the entree into a true American life, Vera represents the loathed certainties – but, for all that, they are still certainties – of the past Slava would rather leave behind. Betwixt the various complications besieging his life, Slava is indeed caught between two very different worlds.
Ambition always comes with the risk of over-reach, though. The problem with “A Replacement Life” is that it sometimes feels that there is less to it than meets the eye. Fishman’s prose is often too self-conscious, too perfectly crafted to be real. “Nice sentences are like a beautiful woman who doesn’t know how to cook,” Slava’s grandfather chastises him, after he turns in an over-wrought draft claim. Given the preponderance of over-wrought sentences in the book, one assumes the irony is unintended.
Elsewhere, Fishman seems a bit too ready with the in-joke and the knowing aside. Arianna, unintentionally, reassures Slava that facts can be flexible. “This is why stories about a murder in the forgotten tribe of Waka-Waka… are easily the easiest to check. These people don’t read Century. They don’t care if you counted wrong how many stripes of cow dung they have on their face.”
As it happens, The New Yorker – Century’s template – ran into a spot of fact-checking bother concerning a similar story a couple of years back. Lawsuits were filed, the matter resolved less than satisfactorily. It’s a clever touch on Fishman’s part, but perhaps a bit too clever.
But it’s not the relatively small things like these that stop “A Replacement Life” from achieving its fullest potential. A signed-up member of the Soviet Jewish American School of Fiction – and I hope I got the adjectives in the right order – Fishman has a style that cleaves closest to that of the dean of the faculty, Gary Shteyngart. Like Shteyngart, Fishman uses humor to mitigate bleak observations about human nature; like Shteyngart, Fishman’s strengths lie in the anecdote and the comic aside.
These tricks may work well elsewhere, but here only serve to distract from “A Replacement Life’s” emotional heart: immigration, identity, negotiating the truths and falsehoods of the Holocaust, and everything that falls in between; Fishman does have sharp truths to tell about all these, but they feel somewhat blunted once run against the ironic detachment that characterizes Slava.
It’s a pity; “A Replacement Life” is a thoughtful book, replete with acutely observed scenes from migrant life. Slava takes Arianna around his old stomping grounds of south Brooklyn and Brighton Beach: “Where he saw desperation and scraping, she saw another act in New York’s great ethnic circus.”
Ultimately, “A Replacement Life” sets the bar for itself too high; because what it could have achieved is visible, just out of reach, its shortcomings resonate all the more.
Akin Ajayi is a freelance writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv.
http://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.pr...
Slava Gelman’s greatest misfortune, one might surmise, was to have been born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. His family migrated from Minsk, in Soviet Belarus, to the United States when he was a child; old enough to remember the old country, he was yet young enough – fool enough, perhaps – to believe he could escape its baleful influence on his life.
Fat chance. Like it or not, he was trapped between two worlds. He could only envy the effortless ease with which others surrendered themselves to New York. As for Minsk, unlike his parents and grandparents, he had no sentimental connection, other than an “unfocused fear of bodily harm,” because he was a Jew. That and his memory of the scent of the lilac trees that filled the yard.
“A Replacement Life,” the debut novel by Boris Fishman – born in Minsk in 1979, emigrated to the United States in 1988 – is an unusual book. Meditations on migration and the curious half-life that ensues are thick on the ground, and of variable quality. (There is, of course, an established school of Soviet Jewish American migrant fiction, whose faculty include Lara Vapnyar, David Bezmozgis and, most notably, Gary Shteyngart.) Most try to shine an honest – if not always fulsomely positive – light on the tribulations of relocation. But “A Replacement Life” stands out, not least for its exceptional candor, and the machinations that shape the plot. Of course, it would be pretty hard to cast sympathetic light on an attempt to defraud the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
It is worth keeping in mind that there is a real-life counterpart to this, dating back a couple of years, when Russian-speaking Jewish migrants employed by the Conference conspired to siphon off $42 million of funds intended for distribution to Holocaust survivors.
But let’s go back to Slava. When we first meet Fishman’s (sort-of) anti-hero, he is perched precariously between two incompatible worlds. He fancies himself as a writer, an erudite man of letters; but he is stuck in an anonymous junior position at Century, an upmarket literary periodical. (Any resemblance to The New Yorker, where Fishman himself once worked as a fact checker one assumes, is purely un-coincidental.)
Slava holds the journal and its supercilious values in the highest regard; unsurprisingly, his desire for total assimilation into America sublimates into a quest – on the whole, quixotic – to score a coveted writing commission for the magazine. The problem is that Slava can’t quite manage to crack the code that will permit him to believe that he belongs.
It’s a question of his antecedents, he thinks, rooted in the working-class Soviet emigre community of south Brooklyn. He has to do everything he can do to make it seem that he belongs to the real America, not its ugly stepbrother immigrant counterpart. Slava can run from Russian-language coarseness and blue-collar chicanery if he chooses; he’ll never manage to hide from it though, especially if it comes chasing after him.
Particularly unsympathetic is grandfather Yevgeny, hard as nails and particularly attuned to the opportunities available to sharp-elbowed men on the make. He is not impressed by Slava’s attempts to craft himself as a man of letters. Men should live by their wits and not their words, whether in America or elsewhere. “This country does not invent things?” Yevgeny demands of Slava. “Bush did not invent a reason to cut off Saddam’s balls? When the stocks fall down, it’s not because someone invented the numbers?”
There are many routes to achieving the immigrant’s American Dream, it seems. After Yevgeny’s wife – Slava’s grandmother – dies, Slava is half-shamed, half-bullied into putting his writing skills to what Yevgeny determines is a more practical goal. According to the Claims Conference, Yevgeny didn’t “suffer the right way” to qualify for restitution paid to survivors of the Holocaust. So why not spin a story that will fit the bill?
Facts are curious things, much more arbitrary than we readily acknowledge. Fishman works this ambiguity astutely in setting the scene for “A Replacement Life.” Even those of us – most of us, I assume – who would shudder at the notion of defrauding the Claims Conference would admit that the definition of “victim” can seem, at best, somewhat rigid. Restitution goes only to those who were “incarcerated in concentration camps, ghettos or forced labor battalions.”
That’s not Yevgeny, whose unerring sense of self-preservation saved him from the worst of the war. But not from the banality of everyday anti-Semitism afterward. Facts are just a convenient subset of the fiction genre, and Yevgeny has convinced himself that he is as deserving as the next victim.
Slava the writer is going to put his skills to good use for a change; Yevgeny tasks him with crafting a convincing narrative to submit to the Claims Conference.
Artificial bifurcations
“A Replacement Life” is an ambitious, insistently clever book. A recurring refrain is the artificial bifurcations that distort our engagement with everyday life. There’s the American/not-American dichotomy (also, in its own way, a hierarchy); there’s the vexed issue of who is called, or gets to be called, a Holocaust survivor. Fishman works this theme further into Slava’s life. Given his gaucheness, he improbably tumbles into a relationship with Arianna, an elegant and sophisticated fact-checker at Century. Arianna is Jewish, too, but of much older immigrant stock; Slava can only but envy her comfortable assimilation into her milieu.
Then there’s Vera, the daughter of pre-migration family friends but still resolutely non-American, who turns up unexpectedly at Slava’s grandmother’s shivah (seven-day period of mourning). When the two were children, the joke was that they were the perfect couple-in-the-making. Two decades on, it seems that Vera still thinks this to be true. The two women are as alike as chalk and cheese: Arianna might be the entree into a true American life, Vera represents the loathed certainties – but, for all that, they are still certainties – of the past Slava would rather leave behind. Betwixt the various complications besieging his life, Slava is indeed caught between two very different worlds.
Ambition always comes with the risk of over-reach, though. The problem with “A Replacement Life” is that it sometimes feels that there is less to it than meets the eye. Fishman’s prose is often too self-conscious, too perfectly crafted to be real. “Nice sentences are like a beautiful woman who doesn’t know how to cook,” Slava’s grandfather chastises him, after he turns in an over-wrought draft claim. Given the preponderance of over-wrought sentences in the book, one assumes the irony is unintended.
Elsewhere, Fishman seems a bit too ready with the in-joke and the knowing aside. Arianna, unintentionally, reassures Slava that facts can be flexible. “This is why stories about a murder in the forgotten tribe of Waka-Waka… are easily the easiest to check. These people don’t read Century. They don’t care if you counted wrong how many stripes of cow dung they have on their face.”
As it happens, The New Yorker – Century’s template – ran into a spot of fact-checking bother concerning a similar story a couple of years back. Lawsuits were filed, the matter resolved less than satisfactorily. It’s a clever touch on Fishman’s part, but perhaps a bit too clever.
But it’s not the relatively small things like these that stop “A Replacement Life” from achieving its fullest potential. A signed-up member of the Soviet Jewish American School of Fiction – and I hope I got the adjectives in the right order – Fishman has a style that cleaves closest to that of the dean of the faculty, Gary Shteyngart. Like Shteyngart, Fishman uses humor to mitigate bleak observations about human nature; like Shteyngart, Fishman’s strengths lie in the anecdote and the comic aside.
These tricks may work well elsewhere, but here only serve to distract from “A Replacement Life’s” emotional heart: immigration, identity, negotiating the truths and falsehoods of the Holocaust, and everything that falls in between; Fishman does have sharp truths to tell about all these, but they feel somewhat blunted once run against the ironic detachment that characterizes Slava.
It’s a pity; “A Replacement Life” is a thoughtful book, replete with acutely observed scenes from migrant life. Slava takes Arianna around his old stomping grounds of south Brooklyn and Brighton Beach: “Where he saw desperation and scraping, she saw another act in New York’s great ethnic circus.”
Ultimately, “A Replacement Life” sets the bar for itself too high; because what it could have achieved is visible, just out of reach, its shortcomings resonate all the more.
Akin Ajayi is a freelance writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv.
November 30, 2024
My surprise read of 2024. Did not expect to be as invested in this story as I was, and I appreciated the dry/dark humor throughout.
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