Review by New York Times Review
IN THE OPENING CHAPTER of "The Yid," Paul Goldberg's debut novel, state security agents "dressed in anemia-green coats" come to arrest the titular yid, Solomon Levinson, a retired actor from the Moscow State Jewish Theater with a background in Shakespeare and combat experience in the Red Army. "At night," Goldberg writes, "Moscow is the czardom of black cats and Black Marias," and the scene that develops brings to mind the darkly satirical atmosphere of Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita," enhanced by Goldberg's ironic commentary on Soviet history and the Yiddish theater. It's an impressive set piece, but a simple problem still needs to be solved: How is Levinson, who is almost 60, going to escape that room so the story can continue? "The Yid" is a personal passion project with origins in fact: In March 1953, Joseph Stalin died just before he could carry out a huge pogrom to exterminate all of his country's Jews. Goldberg's own parents were on the list of those to be murdered, he tells us in his dedication. This legacy has produced not a nonfiction account but a novel, odd in that it is surprisingly comic. How does Solomon Levinson get out of that room? He explodes into "a one-man Judean Air Force: a single pirouette, two Finnish daggers, two throats slit," dispatching Stalin's emissaries ninja style. Goldberg then invents a revenge fantasy in which Levinson assembles a group of unlikely assassins to kill Stalin before he can implement his evil plan. The word "ragtag" comes to mind. The word "bunch" comes to mind. There is Friederich Lewis, a black man from Omaha who fled the repression of Jim Crow to work in the Soviet Union as an engineer. There is Aleksandr Kogan, a gifted Jewish surgeon whose life is endangered by accusations that he's part of a "Doctors' Plot" to assassinate Soviet leaders. There's Kima Petrova, a young woman with a vendetta rooted in the state murders of her parents. "You might dismiss this as a vaudevillian display not grounded in character," Goldberg writes of Levinson's dagger trick, "but if you are inclined to be charitable, you might see that Komandir Levinson was leading Red Army soldiers on an airborne journey across the chasm that separates the stage from life." Goldberg has done his homework - amid the story of the gang's antics we get a seedy and detailed portrait of life under Stalinism, with its sinister initials (NKVD, SMERSH), its street thugs and crooked policemen, its paranoid conspiracies and hypocrisies and state-orchestrated liquidations. Even better, we occasionally get the flavor of the day-to-day torpor: "He smokes Belomor, an unfortunate habit he picked up during the war. He smoked to warm up then, to feel something other than adrenaline or boredom, to ward off sadness and fear, to vacate the mind, to make the music stop. When he smoked, he thought of nothing but his smoke." It's in such quiet moments that "The Yid" grounds itself more deeply in character and begins to come emotionally alive as a novel, rather than as a madcap romp. But the book never really detaches itself from the mechanics of action stories (I suspect it doesn't want to). Like many thriller writers, Goldberg devotes countless pages to his scrupulous research. He can give us a post-mortem on exactly how those state security agents died of their Finnish dagger wounds. He can translate a joke from Russian to Yiddish to English and back again. He knows the difference between an IS 2-8-4 locomotive, used for passenger trains, and an SO-type locomotive, used for freight trains, which is important in considering how Stalin and his minions might transport the millions of Jews before and after their extermination. This kind of data can be interesting, but while reading "The Yid" it sometimes feels as if Goldberg had put together a thousand index cards, each containing some salient fact or historical episode, and wrote his novel in order to include them all. He himself diagnoses the problem with this approach when he writes of Levinson: "He was an autodidact. . . . They can amass facts - vast storerooms of facts - but they are too uncertain of themselves to get comfortable with doubt, humility and nuance." It's a lack of nuance that might explain why the characters in "The Yid" and their triumphant story are less compelling than the book's historical background. The ragtag bunch goes on its mission and certain plot moves - skirmishes, nighttime forays in disguise, clever ruses, small victories, moments of doubt - need to occur along the way. But we want to understand why the individual characters are going to all this trouble in the first place, not just out of abstract principle but out of felt need. Too often, "The Yid" adheres to schematics. This means that Friederich Lewis, who is black, has no flaws, that Kogan, the surgeon, is always rational, that Kima, the orphan, is a fierce warrior princess, rather than a wounded hell-raiser. Wondering how he got mixed up with these people, Lewis muses: "What is he doing in that cold, impoverished, barbaric land? The Moor of the World Revolution. . . . Has Lewis agreed to follow these clowns in a horrific, heroic, hilarious dive off the trapeze?" If you are inclined to be charitable, you will take "The Yid" for the frolic it wants to be, and not worry too much about how something can be horrific and hilarious at the same time. Absurdity is the air we breathe now (as has been said a thousand times). Is "The Yid" an old-fashioned caper like "Ocean's Eleven" or is it a Quentin Tarantino pastiche of such an old-fashioned caper? Is there a difference anymore? Perhaps we get a clue when Goldberg gives us an obligatory love scene between the noble Lewis and the fetching Kima, and with solemn idealism Lewis thinks: "And when I die and face my God, I'll say: 'I held your sword. I fought for her. I fought for freedom.'" In this abandonment of irony, Lewis's heroic declamation shows that something really can be horrific and hilarious at the same time. Lighten up, people might say - a light touch is a form of graciousness. Goldberg writes from Stalin's point of view: "Hang some, behead a few. Then, stand upon a tower and watch the start of lynching, the pogrom, the biggest of all time, a Kristallnacht times 10, or times a hundred! . . . Let's say Americans blow up the atom. He'll blow up hydrogen then! His soul dances amid the flames." The problem with this is that it leaves us too comfortably on the right side of history, too comfortable in our distance from its horrors. We can't envision the past with anything close to total accuracy. But this doesn't matter - it doesn't matter even for historical novelists. When we imagine the past, we just have to envision enough of it to undermine our complacency about how well we understand the present. The slur that gives "The Yid" its title is so old that it will strike many now as funny. What about the slurs that still cut? A revenge fantasy in which a group of unlikely assassins try to stop a pogrom. ZACHARY LAZAR is the author, most recently, of the novel "I Pity the Poor Immigrant."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 21, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Paul Goldberg emigrated from Moscow to the U.S. at 14 in 1973 and became a reporter focused on Soviet dissidents and cancer research. His firsthand knowledge of Soviet life and his medical expertise inform The Yid, his wily, rambunctiously entertaining first novel about an unlikely group of valorous would-be assassins and one of history's most alarming close calls. A clue to the modus operandi of his tale's irresistible characters is found in Goldberg's journalistic agility and tenacity, which inspired the New York Times to describe him as a Russian émigré with a quirky sense of humor and a thirst for the jugular. In late February 1953, a Soviet security detail is on a routine late-night run to arrest a Jew, an old Yid, Solomon Levinson, once an actor at the celebrated Moscow State Yiddish Theater. Tall, thin, and leaning on a cane, he's an easy mark, if only he would stop talking. Friederich Lewis is an engineer from Omaha and a rare being in the USSR, an African American, leading to his often being hailed as Paul Robeson. When Lewis arrives at his longtime friend Levinson's apartment later that night, the Yid is still in full performance mode and quickly recruits Lewis for a mission that grows more ambitious, dangerous, and outrageous by the minute. This unlikely duo is soon joined by Aleksandr Kogan, a surgeon who, like Levinson, served in the Red Army. He is also targeted for arrest as part of Stalin's Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a genocidal scheme involving the spreading of lies about syringe-wielding Jewish killer doctors, fear-mongering calculated to whip up enough anti-Semitic frenzy to fuel a massive pogrom followed by the deportation of any Jewish survivors to the Siberian Arctic. As the number of Levinson's motley followers grows, so, too, does the body count. Goldberg's rapier-like, galvanizing novel unwinds in three acts punctuated by hilarious, flashing, and slashing dialogue as these rebels of temperaments deliberate and impulsive, skills invaluable and surprising, and memories painful and inspiriting, banter, lewdly insult each other, and argue over Shakespeare, Pushkin, Akhmatova, medical ethics, the broken promise of socialism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Ultimately, they decide that there is only one thing to do: come up with a plan to kill Stalin before he annihilates more than two millions Jews. As the doomsday clock runs down, Goldberg deftly presents plays within plays, in which his heroic, smart, acerbic, wildly improvising, cool-under-fire characters use stagecraft to attempt an impossible mission. Goldberg ingeniously captures the brutality and lunacy of Stalin's rule as well as Russia's stoicism in this spectacularly incisive, humanizing, and comedically cathartic theater of the absurd.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Goldberg's lively first novel imagines Soviet history as a violent farce that averts a tragedy for Russia's Jews. The titular "Yid" is Solomon Levinson, a deadly, buffoonish member of a disbanded Yiddish theater company who likens himself to the puppet Petrushka, a "sad, angry clown battling the forces of history." In the novel's breathtaking opening, Levinson verbally duels with, and then brutally dispatches, three soldiers sent to capture him as part of a pogrom in 1953. Stalin, a paranoid "alter kaker" holed up in his country dacha, has given orders to "forever rid the Motherland" of its Jewish population. Levinson decides that the only hope for him and Soviet Jews is to stage a play of his own that deposes the genocidal tyrant. The slightly unhinged director, for whom the lines between stage and reality are blurred, assembles a cast to aid him in his improvised plot, including an accomplished doctor, an orphaned young woman, and an African-American Communist disillusioned at finding the same racism in Soviet Russia as he did in Jim Crow America. Divided into three acts, the novel zips along even as Goldberg smuggles in a healthy dose of fascinating Soviet history-its revolutionaries, artists, absurdities, and poisonous anti-Semitism. The result is a stretch of fictionalized history so fully realized it feels as though it actually happened. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
It's early 1953 in Stalin's Russia, and empty cattle cars are rumbling toward population centers across the vast country. Their objective: to collect the nation's Jews in a final pogrom. In this fantastical (and fantastic) debut novel by reporter and writer Goldberg, who immigrated to the United States from the USSR in 1973, a troupe of unlikely Soviet characters assembles with a single objective. Having heard rumors of the impending pogrom, which would have followed the so-called doctors' plot (in which numerous Jewish Soviet doctors were actually arrested for supposedly trying to assassinate top Soviet leaders), our band of unlikely conspirators sets out to do in Stalin before his henchmen unleash the pogrom. The conspirators include Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an elderly actor from the former Jewish State Theater; his friends Aleksandr Kogan, a prominent surgeon who served as a Red Army gunner during the revolution, and Frederick Lewis, an African American working in the country as an engineer; and a mysterious young woman named Kima Petrova. To add to this darkly bubbling froth, the author blends in such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall and treats us to poetry by Anna Akhmatova in Russian and English. The author's justification (none needed!) for his work: "A leap of fiction brings with it the privilege to blend history with fantasy." VERDICT Highly recommended for readers with a grasp of history who enjoy imaginative deviations from what we think we know as historical truth. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/15.]-Edward B. Cone, New York © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Goldberg's debut, set in 1953, a pair of offbeat Jewish characters and an American Negro come to terms with life, death, and theater as Stalin's final pogrom gains steam. Divided into three "acts," the book opens with an early-morning knock on the door of Levinson, a frail old veteran of the Red Army and the now-defunct State Jewish Theater. Surprised at how open Levinson is to their visit, a state security official and two soldiers quickly discover he is no harmless clown via his sudden "pirouette with Finnish daggers." A short time later, Levinson joins up with Kogan, a noted surgeon he knows from the army, and Lewis, a black friend who came to the Soviet Union from the United States for a factory job, to dispose of the three dead bodies, get rid of a black security van, and make plans to assassinate Stalin. The killings become an excuse for them to trade mortal visions, political philosophies, and especially tales of the days when Levinson, dubbed "the janitor of human souls," took a back seat to the great actor Solomon Mikhoels, who, before his murder in 1948, was director of the Jewish Theater. Largely based on stories passed down by the author's father and grandfather, the book contains facts that still unsettle. You could squeeze 60 people into a single cattle car "if you don't care how many of them are still breathing upon arrival," the 400,000 Jewish citizens of Moscow into 130 trains, and the entire Jewish population of the USSR into 730 trains. But this sophisticated entertainment transcends historical detail with flighty dialogue exchanges that, presented in script style, seem like a cross between Samuel Beckett and Sholem Aleichem. References to other real-life figures, including Paul Robeson and Marc Chagall, add to the color. For all its dark, discursive content, Goldberg's novel about unlikely rebels plotting Stalin's downfall is streaked with hard-earned wisdom. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
