By Boris Fishman
A singularly proficient author makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and infrequently hilarious tale of a failed journalist requested to do the unthinkable: forge Holocaust-restitution claims for outdated Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.
Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, ''didn't endure within the specific way'' he must have suffered to qualify for the reparations the German govt has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. yet undergo he has—as a Jew within the struggle, as a second-class citizen within the USSR, as an immigrant in the United States. So? Isn't his grandson a ''writer''?
High-minded Slava desires to positioned all this immigrant-scraping in the back of him. basically the yankee dream isn't panning out for him: Century, the mythical journal the place he works as a researcher, wishes not anything better from him. Slava desires to be an accurate, innocent American—but he desires to be a lionized author even more.
Slava's flip because the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that now not each truth is a fact and never each lie a falsehood. It takes greater than law-abiding to turn into an American; it takes an analogous self-reinvention at which his humans excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by means of his innovations, Slava dangers publicity. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that eventually provides him a feeling of domestic in America—but now not prior to gathering an enduring cost from his family.
A substitute existence is a gloomy, relocating, and wonderfully written novel approximately family members, honor, and justice.
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Extra resources for A Replacement Life
Example text
The battlefield is Cuban culture and the armies are the intellectual and political elites of the island. 6 26 Essays in Cuban Intellectual History A Map of Eugenics The scenario for this discursive war was not only Cuban culture, of course. The same war was fought elsewhere: in Spain, the United States, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and in almost all of the Latin American countries. All of these conflicts staged a confrontation between moral discourses and civilizing paradigms. The defeat of Spain was, for some, the definitive proof of the decline of Hispanic civilization (perhaps even of Iberian civilization) and, in the more extreme opinions, of Latin civilization as a whole.
7 The historiography of 1898, both inside and outside Cuba, however, has not taken stock of the extensive proliferation of discourse that the war of 1898 generated in the island’s letters. I will first offer here an overview of the discursive tensions that 1898 produced in the United States, Spain, and Latin America, and then focus on the postcolonial debate in Cuba. American public opinion had demonstrated a great interest in the separatist war in Cuba since 1895. 8 The cartoonist Frederic Remington and the correspondents Richard Harding Davis, James Crelman, and Stephen Crane all lived in the Inglaterra Hotel.
To assume the opposite—that his ideas were honored during the Republic and betrayed by the Revolution, or that the latter “rescued the tomb” after its republican oblivion and profanation—is to persist in symbolic quarreling between two authoritarian alternatives vying to control national documents. This page intentionally left blank 2 The Moral Frontier Technically speaking, the military war between the United States and Cuba lasted less than a month. 1 There were two more or less important battles: the ground battle of San Juan Hill and the naval battle of Santiago Bay.