Rubina, Dina, Here Comes the Messiah! (Вот идёт Мессия!, Russian original 1996) [translated by Daniel M. Jaffe, Zephyr Press, 2000] – hc - 978-0939010622 and pb - 978-0939010608 [- Considered one of Rubina’s most important works, it is structured as a story within a story. It follows Ziama, a Russian Jewish émigré woman living in Israel, whose life is being written by a character called “Writer N.” — herself also a Russian émigré. The narrative moves back and forth between Writer N.’s own life and the fictional life of Ziama that she’s creating, with hints that even Writer N. may be a construct of yet another narrator layered above her.
International · Fiction author
Dina Rubina
Dina Rubina (born 1953 In Tashkent, Uzbek SSR [then USSR], now residing in Mevasseret Tsiyon, Israel) [Her parents were both Ukrainian Jews, her mother having been evacuated from Poltava to Tashkent, and her father having served as a front-line soldier in the Soviet army during the war. She began publishing short stories as a teenager, studied music at Tashkent Conservatory, and moved to Moscow in the mid-1980s after some years writing for stage and screen. She made aliyah to Israel in 1990. She is considered one of the most prominent Russian-language Israeli writers, with books translated into 30 languages. Her major themes are Jewish and Israeli history, migration, and the interplay between Israeli and Russian Jewish cultures and languages. She continues to write exclusively in Russian, describing her Israeli environment as adding new “auditory and associative overtones” to her Russian prose rather than replacing it. Note: I classified Daniil Kluger, another Russian-language Israeli author, in my Israeli authors category and Dina Rubina among the International authors, only because more of Kluger’s novels are set in Israel. Kluger moved to Israel in 1994, Rubina in 1990. The distinction is technical and a bit arbitrary. Books of relevance:
Rubina, Dina, Liubka (Любка), 1989 - novella translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, published in the literary journal “Story”, no. 25 (1991): 25–37. [The head of a gang, professional thief and criminal, Liubka turns out to be the only honest person, the only one who does not betray Irina Mikhailovna, the young Jewish doctor who becomes subject to alienation and persecution because of the “Doctors’ case” in the mid-50s. The “Doctors’ Plot” was the real 1953 Stalin-era antisemitic conspiracy campaign against Jewish physicians. Critics consider it Rubina’s most socio-political story, reflecting the atmosphere of the first perestroika years, with the doctor’s Jewishness serving as a marker of social alienation. Crime (organized theft) and Jewish persecution are directly interwoven here.
Rubina, Dina, The White Dove of Cordova (Белая голубка Кордовы), 2009 – not available in English translation. [The protagonist, Zakhar (Zakhar) Kordovin, is a charismatic Russian-born Israeli art historian, painter, and internationally respected authority on European art. Publicly he lectures, authenticates Old Master paintings, and advises museums and collectors. Secretly, however, he is one of the world’s greatest art forgers, capable of reproducing the techniques of artists from El Greco to Modigliani with astonishing precision. His double life allows him to deceive collectors while preserving what he sees as a higher artistic truth.
Rubina gradually reveals that Zakhar’s criminal career grew out of tragedy. As a young man in Leningrad he and his gifted friend Andrei inherited access to a cache of masterpieces hidden before the Second World War. Their remarkable talents attracted the attention of unscrupulous art dealers and organized criminals. Betrayal followed: the collection disappeared, Andrei was brutally murdered, and Zakhar dedicated his life both to mastering forgery and to finding those responsible.
Years later, while attending an academic conference in Spain, Zakhar discovers what appears to be an insignificant old painting. His trained eye recognizes clues suggesting that it conceals a forgotten work connected with the circle of El Greco. The discovery sets in motion an international intrigue involving museum experts, Vatican officials, collectors, art traffickers, and organized criminals. At the same time, Zakhar continues his decades-long search for the man who destroyed his friend’s life.
The investigation unexpectedly becomes a journey into Zakhar’s own ancestry. In Córdoba he uncovers evidence that his family descends from Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The mysterious painting, together with family heirlooms and Hebrew inscriptions, reveals links to forgotten ancestors named Cordovera, suggesting that the work he had manipulated for profit was actually the creation of one of his own forebears rather than an El Greco masterpiece. This realization forces him to confront the irony that he has erased his own family’s artistic legacy in pursuit of wealth and revenge.
In the novel’s climax, Zakhar abandons his lucrative fraud, rejects the enormous financial rewards attached to the forged attribution, and attempts to restore the painting’s true authorship. By doing so he symbolically restores his family’s historical identity as well. Pursued by gangsters whose interests he has betrayed, he sacrifices himself so that others may survive, bringing together the novel’s themes of redemption, ancestry, and moral responsibility.
Rubina, Dina, The “Russian Canary” trilogy (Русская канарейка) — Zheltukhin (2014), Voice/Golos (2014), Prodigal Son/Bludny Syn (2015) - not available in English translation. [This is a multi-generational Jewish family saga [the Etinger family] spanning Odessa, Vienna, Kazakhstan and beyond, which — as one reader review put it — turns into a spy novel... with the plot twisting through a dozen or so countries and dwelling on the sacrifices of intelligence agents. Notably, the trilogy isn’t particularly preoccupied with identity politics — there’s no tortured musing about what it means to be Israeli, Russian, or Western despite the intelligence-agency backdrop, which makes it read more as a genre spy story riding on top of the family saga than as an ideological novel. It was released as an audiobook, narrated by Rubina herself in Russian.
Through this frame, Rubina populates the book with people claiming to be the Messiah, con artists and their victims, Jewish and Christian pilgrims, Holocaust survivors, Palestinian Arabs, journalists, gay characters, children, and even pets — all negotiating the absurdities and dangers of daily life in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and the West Bank. It’s been described as both a satire of Russian émigré life in Israel and an exploration of the spiritual, messianic undercurrents running through the region’s multi-ethnic population — essentially a modern, postmodern retelling of a biblical story about a people gone astray and searching for redemption, told with a mix of comedy and genuine sorrow. – Claude]