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    A REPLACEMENT LIFE
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    A REPLACEMENT LIFE
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    A REPLACEMENT LIFE
    Ebook382 pages4 hours

    A REPLACEMENT LIFE

    By Boris Fishman

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A failing young Russian American journalist's life is unexpectedly transformed when he forges Holocaust restitution claims for his rogue grandfather and his friends


    Slava Gelman wants to be a great writer, but can't get past his job as a lowly researcher at a New York magazine. Then his beloved grandmother dies, and his grandfather corners him with a request: to write a few Holocaust retribution claims that aren't quite true. Slava is reluctant, but when he gets into it, his semi-fictional accounts of a generation's real suffering turn out to be the best writing he has ever done - and a surprisingly wonderful way for Slava to reconnect with his family and his own roots. Although he lives in fear of discovery and continues to stumble from one tragicomic incident to another, by the time Slava is finally confronted by a German government employee he is ready to play a role that is - almost - heroic. A beautifully written, emotionally powerful literary debut about family love, memory and the truth in fiction.


    Boris Fishmanwas born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1979 and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He is the editor ofWild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, and his work has appeared in theNew Yorker,The New York Times Magazine,New Republic,Wall Street Journal,London Review of Books,New York Times Book Reviewand other publications. He lives in New York City.A Replacement Lifeis his first novel.

    ‘A Replacement Lifeis a memorable debut by a wonderfully gifted young writer... Boris Fishman has written a beautifully nuanced, tender, and often very funny novel about conscience and familial loyalty that will linger long in the memory’ - Joyce Carol Oates

    ’Is there room in American fiction for another brilliant young émigré writer? There had better be, because here he is. Boris Fishman's first novel,A Replacement Life, is bold, ambitious and wickedly smart... The only problem with this novel is that its covers are too close together. I wanted more’ - Patricia T. O'Conner,New York Times Book Review

    ’Astonishingly brilliant... we are left satisfyingly provoked by the book's deeper questions about culture and ethics and survival and human nature itself’ -Chicago Tribune

    ’Mordantly funny and moving’ -The New York Times

    ’So strong in voice, humor, and compassion that it transcends fiction's limitations to become something wilder and more contained - like life. What a remarkable debut - true and resonate, humorous and real’ - Hilton Als

    ’Shines with a love for language and craft’ - starred review,Publishers Weekly

    ’Fishman fearlessly tackles the grandest subjects... a writer not only to watch but envy’ - Tom Bissell

    ’A terrific talent... a gifted and accomplished writer’ - Salvatore Scibona

    ’Stunning...A Replacement Lifedeserves a wide audience’ - Jim Harrison

    ’A novel that works beautifully on many levels’ - Arthur Phillips

    ’A hell of a book. Told with amazing virtuosity, fun and serious, funny and sad, profound and eminently readable’ - Darin Strauss

    ’Suffused with elegant language and sly humor and composed with the authority of a novelist on intimate terms with both his subject matter and art form’ - Teddy Wayne, author ofThe Love Song of Jonny Valentine

    ’There's a touch of Gogol here, a touch of Babel, a touch of Dostoyevsky, but... Boris Fishman has fashioned something distinctively and triumphantly his own’ - Brian Morton, author ofStarting Out in the Evening

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherONE
    Release dateJul 4, 2014
    ISBN9780992918217
    Unavailable
    A REPLACEMENT LIFE
    Author

    Boris Fishman

    Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Travel + Leisure, the London Review of Books, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, among other publications. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, which was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for A REPLACEMENT LIFE

    3.5/5

    43 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      first, my thanks to Harper for my advanced reader copy. I had a great time with this novel and have already recommended it to a number of people; I've also put it on the list for my book group to read in 2015. Obviously, I liked it. A lot. Slava Gelman comes from a family of Russian immigrants who had settled in Brooklyn. He'd made a conscious decision to "become an American," to leave his grandfather Yevgeny's "neighborhood of Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians and Uzbeks" and set his sights on working for Century, a longstanding and prestigious magazine, "older than The New Yorker and, despite a recent decline, forever a paragon." Staying in the neighborhood would keep him among the ranks of those who ". . . don't go to America," except for the DMV and Brodvei," or who "shop at marts that sold birch-leafed switches" to "whip yourself in the steam bath and rare Turkish shampoos that reversed baldness . . ." but this is not what Slava wants. He had to leave, in order to"strip from his writing the pollution that repossed it every time he returned to the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn."In short, to write for Century, he had to get away, to "Dialyze himself, like Grandmother's kidneys." So it's off to Manhattan and a sparsely-furnished, affordable studio apartment. As he's about to find out, getting away is not so easy. As the novel opens, it's July, 2006, and just after 5 am, Slava is surprised by the ringing of the telephone. It's not because it's so early, but rather because no one ever calls him, not even his family, since he'd "forbidden" them to call. He doesn't answer it, but the second time it rings, it's his mother telling him that his "grandmother isn't." She'd died alone in the care facility. He hadn't seen Grandmother Sofia for about a month, and now she's gone, and as his mother puts it, it's the family's "first American death." After the funeral, Yevgeny asks him to write a narrative that would allow him to collect reparations as a victim of the Holocaust. He hands Slava an envelope, addressed to Sofia who was registered at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. When Slava notes that this was for his grandmother, not his grandfather, his grandfather tells him to make it up. As he states, "Maybe I didn't suffer in the exact way I need to have suffered ... but they made sure to kill all the people who did. "Eventually Slava gives in, and he starts thinking about all of the things that his grandparents never told him, and how he really knew nothing about his grandmother's life and what she'd gone through. What little he does know goes into the narrative, and the rest, he invents but makes fit the story. His work is so good that word spreads, and Yevgeny pimps him out to write other narratives for friends. Each one builds a little more on the made-up, missing details of Sofia's life, and Slava begins to find it easier to lie, to fabricate, to make stuff up. He gets so good at it that he even starts doing it at his job at Century -- and it spills over into other parts of his life as well. However, the narratives he writes also have a few unintended results for Slava that he probably never could have predicted. A Replacement Life made me laugh out loud in a few spots, especially when it came to the older folk in this book and the insider look at the Russian immigrant culture from someone who is part of it. On the other hand, it's also very touching, not only in terms of family relationships but also because of the history that's recalled in this book. Another positive: the Holocaust is a very large part of this story, but the terrors of the Holocaust, for the most part, are kept in check so you can focus on the modern-day narrative. And I don't understand why people have complained about the writing style: it's obvious that Mr. Fishman enjoys playing with language and playing with other writers' words in his own way. I found it very easy to read in terms of writing and style. This book I can definitely recommend -- and not simply as a summer read.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      I think that it is almost unfair to call this a brilliant debut novel, because in my opinion, Boris Fishman does not write like a debut novelist. Taken at face-value, this story is marvelous, with memorable, powerful, evocative characters and a stirring and gripping plot, not your typical story of immigration by a long shot. This story is one with the literary flavor of the ubiquitous onion, peeling away at multiple layers of one's sense of self, of history, of love, of connection across the generations, of the ability to sacrifice and to use within each person, of the variation in cultural definitions of lies and the truths that matter. On top of all of that, the ending is suspenseful and satisfying, and that is not always seen despite reading a great story, particularly in a debut novel. Upon completion, I can genuinely say that I think I gained some measure of new insight into the heart and mind of a new immigrant to the United States. Just read it!
    • 5/5
      A marvelous debut novel from a writer who recently caught my eye with his riveting memoir called "Savage Feast" (2019). "A Replacement Life" is also quite autobiographical, although the names (and maybe certain other things) are changed. Boris Fishman's talent shines in both works. In this novel, there is a moral dilemma, a love dilemma, an age-old dilemma of belonging and fitting in - for an immigrant (specifically here for an ex-Soviet Jewish person), and all this is crafted, with stirring insight, in the inimitable style of narration that draws you in from page one.Here's an example of a poignant truth about numerous ex-Soviet immigrants in New York (all kinds, not just Jewish), offered by the author so eloquently:"These unlike people had been tossed together like salad by the cupidity of the Soviet government, and now, in America, they were forced to keep speaking Russian, their sole bond, if they wanted to understand each other.... The brethren who had remained in the old world had moved forward in history - they were now citizens of independent countries, their native languages withdrawn from under the rug, buffed, spit-shined, returned to first place, but here in Brooklyn, they were stuck forever in Soviet times. They have gotten marooned on a new island except for what their children would do..."