Fishman, Boris, (A Replacement Life [hc, Harper, 2014] 978-0062287878 [pb, HarperCollins UK, 2015] 978-0957548893 [Slava Gelman, a struggling young writer and child of Soviet Jewish immigrants, is asked to help elderly Russian Jews prepare applications for German Holocaust restitution payments. He gradually becomes involved in fabricating and embellishing restitution claims for applicants whose wartime histories are uncertain or impossible to document. What begins as helping his grandfather becomes a lucrative underground enterprise. The novel explores: Holocaust memory, survivor guilt, post-Soviet immigrant ethics, fraud committed in the name of historical justice, intergenerational conflict, and the moral ambiguity of victimhood. Slava is engaging in document forgery, fraud against the German restitution program, and conspiracy among members of the immigrant community. Yet the novel is not structured as a detective novel. Rather, it asks whether people brutalized by Nazism and Stalinism can be judged by ordinary moral standards. Fishman has explained that he wanted to examine the “flexible relationship to the law” that sometimes developed among ex-Soviet Jews under oppressive regimes—not to vilify them, but to understand how trauma shaped their ethics.
United States · Fiction author
Boris Fishman
Boris Fishman (born 1979, Minsk, then in the Byelorussian SSR (now Belarus).[Emigrated to the U.S. in 1988, at age nine, settling first in Brooklyn and later New Jersey. : B.A. in Russian Literature from Princeton University; MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Novelist, memoirist, essayist and journalist. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and many other publications, and has taught creative writing at Princeton, the University of Montana, and the University of Austin. Although a native Russian speaker, all his books are written ion English and move between the U.S., Russia and occasionally other locations. Although he is not a crime or espionage writer, several of his books contain criminal acts, fraud, moral ambiguity, or the legacy of state oppression—making him relevant to a study of Jews and crime in a broader literary sense.
None of Fishman’s other books touches on the theme of Jews and crime/espionage. – ChatGPT]