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A Replacement Life

Boris Fishman

3.47 · Rating details · 1,356 ratings · 213 reviews

A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: 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 restit ...more

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Hardcover, 336 pages

Published June 3rd 2014 by Harper (first published June 1st 2014)

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Jul 10, 2014 Abby rated it really liked it

Shelves: 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 d 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.

...more

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Jun 08, 2014 Melinda rated it liked it

Shelves: 2014, arc

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, ...more

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Jul 06, 2014 Stuart added it

Very 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 sca Very 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.

...more

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Jun 03, 2014 Jenifer rated it really liked it

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 ...more

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Oct 31, 2014 Kerfe rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

"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 an "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. ...more

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Aug 16, 2014 Dianna Linder rated it it was ok

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, i ...more

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Jul 23, 2014 Lori rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Nov 03, 2015 Lisa Guidarini rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-general, 21st-century, jewish, f

[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 d ...more

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Apr 30, 2014 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: jewish, contemporary

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 ...more

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Oct 18, 2013 Kseniya Melnik rated it it was amazing

Shelves: i-m-thanked-in-acknowledgments, books-by-friends, by-ex-soviet-immigrants

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 ...more

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Feb 01, 2015 Shelley rated it it was amazing

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". An ...more

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Dec 29, 2014 Ted rated it really liked it

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, ...more

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Aug 02, 2015 Ellen rated it liked it

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 oth ...more

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Feb 14, 2014 Annie rated it liked it

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 suf ...more

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Aug 20, 2014 Susan Sherwin rated it liked it

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 ...more

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Jun 19, 2014 Abby Cember rated it really liked it

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. Thi ...more

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Nov 24, 2014 Vanessa Blakeslee rated it really liked it

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 ha ...more

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Sep 06, 2016 Cynthia Paschen rated it really liked it

Shelves: book-group

"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 ge ...more

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Apr 03, 2014 Lauren rated it liked it

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. ...more

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Sep 07, 2014 Alison rated it really liked it

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.

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Jun 14, 2014 Gail rated it really liked it

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. ...more

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Jul 16, 2014 holly rated it really liked it

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.

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Jun 16, 2014 John rated it it was amazing

Wow. This is great. Boris Fishman has nailed it with this, his first novel. Smart, incisive, and funny. Love it.

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Aug 01, 2014 El rated it did not like it

Didn't like story...didn't like writing...didn't care about any of the characters ...more

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Jul 28, 2015 Carol Felstein rated it liked it

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.)

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Mar 23, 2015 Mark rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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 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.
...more

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Feb 18, 2014 Akin added it

Shelves: work, fiction

My 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 e ...more

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Sep 11, 2014 Gayle rated it liked it

Full review at: http://everydayiwritethebookblog.com/...

Boris Fishman’s debut novel, A Replacement Life, is about a young Russian emigre named Slava who is stuck between two worlds. Slava’s grandparents live in Brooklyn, where they still speak Russian and hang out with people from the Old Country. His parents have moved to New Jersey. Slava, meanwhile, lives in Manhattan and slaves away as an overworked researcher at an august magazine that sounds a lot like The New Yorker. He refuses to return Full review at: http://everydayiwritethebookblog.com/...

Boris Fishman’s debut novel, A Replacement Life, is about a young Russian emigre named Slava who is stuck between two worlds. Slava’s grandparents live in Brooklyn, where they still speak Russian and hang out with people from the Old Country. His parents have moved to New Jersey. Slava, meanwhile, lives in Manhattan and slaves away as an overworked researcher at an august magazine that sounds a lot like The New Yorker. He refuses to return to Brooklyn, and doesn’t call or visit his family often, in an attempt to escape his Soviet roots and become an American. But when Slava’s grandmother dies unexpectedly, he is forced to cross the river and mourn with his family.

After Slava’s grandmother’s funeral, his grandfather takes him aside and asks him to take part in a scheme: He’d like Slava to submit a claim on his behalf to the German government for newly-apportioned reparations for Holocaust survivors. But Grandfather doesn’t qualify for reparations, because he was in Uzbekistan during the war, far from the concentration camps and shtetls. It is Slava’s late Grandmother who is the rightful beneficiary of the funds. So Slava must decide: should he reconstruct his late grandmother’s Holocaust experience – one that she refused to talk to him about – and craft it into an application for Grandfather?

Slava gets sucked back into his Soviet family – and his grandparents’ immigrant community – and is finally allowed to be the writer that he is aspiring to be. For after Grandfather reads the application Slava has created for him, he sells his grandson’s writing services to everyone he knows. Before long, Slava is spending his nights in the outer boroughs meeting with Grandfather’s friends, hearing their stories, and then creating applications for reparations to which they are not technically entitled.

Ultimately, this is a story about loyalty, truth, and belonging. To whom does Slava owe loyalty – his scheming but loving grandfather, or the ethics of journalism? The Russian immigrants suffered terribly on their paths to America; was it wrong for them to seek reparations from the country who had indirectly caused their suffering? With whom does Slava belong – his American colleague-girlfriend from the Upper West Side – or the heavily made up Vera, granddaughter of his grandfather’s longtime rival?

Fishman has created a memorable cast of characters in Slava, his family, and the Jewish immigrants he tries to help. A Replacement Life is wry and funny, and Fishman’s writing is crisp. I listened to Fishman read from his book earlier this summer, and I could hear him narrating it in my mind as I read. His book is infused with humor and empathy, but it is also dark and sad at the same time. Bittersweet, perhaps.

There were a few times in the book when I had trouble following the action or identifying who was being referred to, which I chalk up to Fishman’s preference for understated, spare narration. Fishman expects his readers to keep up with him, which is sometimes hard to do. But in the end, A Replacement Life is an exhilarating ride, and one I won’t soon forget. ...more

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Apr 25, 2015 Ernie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Fishman was born in Belarus in the former USSR and came to the USA aged nine where his family settled in “Soviet Brooklyn” where the migrants were “speaking Russian, hating Russians” as they were “stuck forever in Soviet times”. He dedicates this very entertaining first novel to “the walking wounded who survived the degradations of a life in the Soviet Union”. He skips the usual growing up in another culture first novel to focus on the comedy of a young writer working for a magazine and trying t Fishman was born in Belarus in the former USSR and came to the USA aged nine where his family settled in “Soviet Brooklyn” where the migrants were “speaking Russian, hating Russians” as they were “stuck forever in Soviet times”. He dedicates this very entertaining first novel to “the walking wounded who survived the degradations of a life in the Soviet Union”. He skips the usual growing up in another culture first novel to focus on the comedy of a young writer working for a magazine and trying to figure out how to get published without being constantly drawn back to Russian Brooklyn. This is a comedy in the traditional sense of going beyond entertainment to the darker human comedy of survival during and after World War II.
Fishman names his main narrator Slava because his story joins the two unlikely ethnic groups of Slavs and Jews. The Russians he writes about were accepted as refugees to the USA because most of them faked their life stories to become Jews, one even renaming himself Israel. When he takes Slava to a synagogue, it's the first time for the young man. An additional complication is added when the Russians learn on the grapevine that the German government is offering compensation to surviving Jews from the Holocaust. Slava's grandfather, never able to change the w healing and dealing ways that made him a survivor, persuades Slava to write his false claim to the German government, false because he was not a Jew but also because he had been evacuated to the Ukraine where he was conscripted into the Red Army. This task takes Fishman's story back and forth in time as Slava researches the Nazi genocide of the Russian Jews and the largely unknown history of his own family because his grandmother never told him war stories while his grandfather never stopped telling his stories of life in USSR where he had the reputation of a “hooligan” but one who “beat up anti-Semites”.
Word soon spreads through out the Brooklyn Russian community and Slava finds himself overwhelmed with work researching and faking claims for false Russian Jews. Will they and he get away with it? There are many wonderful minor characters such as a taxi driver and Israel, typical of those men whose wives died first, “leaving the men with the most frightening leftovers and life by themselves.” Food is, of course a major ore-occupation of all survivors who had known starvation, let alone typical Russians and Jews and of course, at family gatherings and community events, there is always too much of it.
Fishman balances his stories with Slava's actions both as writer for the claimants where he has to use different voices for each and his efforts to get published. Complications of feuding families and attempts to get him married further enrich the novel and lead to a very satisfying surprise ending. This is a new writer to watch out for. ...more

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Feb 19, 2017 Molly rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017

I'm rounding up to 4/5 for a book that I considered a solid 3.5. I am assuming that if I had understood all of the cultural references a soviet immigrant would have understood, it would have bumped this up to a 4.

As others have noted, this is a character-driven book. I had to push myself to read some of the chapters that seemed to exist only add more detail to Slava, but I'm not confident that they did that. The plot is actually interesting, as is its resolution, but those This Is Slava chapter ...more

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About Boris Fishman

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“Tell me about the war,” he pressed cautiously. She smiled again and began, “Well . . .” The sentence ended there. Her tongue moved but no words emerged. He wanted to say, Tell me because I’d like to tell my grandchildren one day. Tell me because it happened to you, and so I should know. Tell me because it will bring me closer to you, and I want to be close to you. But he was fifteen years old, and he didn’t know how to express thoughts like these. He only knew that he wanted to know. He could tell that she would tell him anything but anything, only if he could stand it please don’t make her talk about that. And though he grasped how important it was for him to know— even if everyone in the family had acquiesced not to trouble Grandmother about it— he couldn’t bring himself to make her. So he said to her: “Forget about the war. Tell me about how you and Grandfather fell in love.” — 6 likes

“No one was dead, but her son would not call just to call. She’d had to enter intimate terms with this new understanding in her life, like an illness.” — 4 likes

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