The Yid: A Novel

Paul Goldberg

Picador, Feb 2, 2016 - Fiction - 336 pages

A DEBUT NOVEL OF DARING ORIGINALITY, THE YID GUARANTEES THAT YOU WILL NEVER THINK OF STALINIST RUSSIA, SHAKESPEARE, THEATER, YIDDISH, OR HISTORY THE SAME WAY AGAIN

Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin," is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant.

While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. Levinson's cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson's Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow's premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall.

As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent, Paul Goldberg's THE YID is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - seeword - LibraryThing

Promos for this compared it to Catch-22 and it was a little like that, but I also thought of The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov (translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson). And ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - laytonwoman3rd - LibraryThing

In 1953, in Stalin's Russia, a knock at the door in the middle of the night meant someone was going for a long ride to nowhere. Iosef Vissarionovich has planned his own final solution to the "Jewish ...

About the author

Paul Goldberg was born in Moscow in 1959 and emigrated to the U.S. at age 14. An award-winning investigative reporter, he is the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, a weekly publication focused on the business and politics of cancer. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, and he has been featured on 60 Minutes, 20/20, CNN and NPR. He is the author of two books on the Soviet human rights movement, The Final Act and The Thaw Generation (with Ludmilla Alexeyeva), and co-author (with Otis Brawley) of a book about the American healthcare system, How We Do Harm. The Yid is his first novel.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Yid: A Novel
• Author: Paul Goldberg
• Publisher: Picador, 2016
• ISBN: 1250079047, 9781250079046
• Length: 336 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Historical; Fiction / Jewish