A Replacement Life: A Novel By Boris Fishman Harper, 336 pages, $25.99 Like the Soviet Union, from which its main characters hail, Boris Fishman’s debut novel, “A Replacement Life,” is a good idea in theory, if not in execution. After his grandmother dies, aspiring writer Slava Gelman is asked by his grandfather to forge a…
An interfaith group sent over 100 tons of matzahs from Israel to 100,000 Jews in the former Soviet Union. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews arranged to have the matzahs that were baked in Jerusalem shipped to Jewish communities in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the head of the…
‘Arguably treasonous’? Former Israeli intelligence chiefs Meir Dagan of Mossad (left) and Yuval Diskin of Shin Bet / Wikimedia Commons There seems be a growing realization on the pro-Israel right — in some corners of it, at least — that its notions of Israel’s security needs don’t have much support among Israel’s security professionals. What…
● The Scent of Pine By Lara Vapnyar Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $25 Twist endings must be well-beloved, so often are they deployed today. (Here’s a twist: Let things be what they are.) To be fair, late-in-the-game surprises, especially when things add up, more or less, are mostly a reviewing annoyance, forcing a reckoning…
Once, during a literature lesson in sixth or seventh grade, in around 1981, a note was passed to me from the back of the classroom. It was a sheet of paper ripped from a composition book. “To the Jew from the Russians” (“evreiu ot russkikh”) was scribbled in Russian on the front of the folded…
● The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe By Olga Gershenson Rutgers University Press, 290 pages, $32.50 As a teenager growing up in Ufa, Russia, I used to play piano in a Jewish music ensemble. Our group was once invited to play a prescreening concert at a local movie theater called Rodina (Motherland), built…
On both occasions that the KGB arrested the Yiddish writer and poet Naftali Herts Kon, it burned his writings. When Kon escaped from the Soviet Union to Poland in 1959, he thought everything would be different — but it wasn’t. When the Polish Communists arrested Kon in 1960, they simply confiscated his writings and refused…
If you’ve been following Vladimir Putin’s image troubles over the Schneerson Library, the priceless Chabad literary trove that the Bolsheviks seized, Russia held and Crown Heights wants, you may have heard about his weird remarks last Thursday (June 13) when he handed over a batch of the treasure to the new Chabad-run museum in Moscow:…
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