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Winner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award
A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.
Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has—as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn’t his grandson a “writer”?
High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him—Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American—but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.
Slava’s turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family.
A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.
| ISBN-13: | 9780062287878 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 06/03/2014 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 982,340 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
A Conversation with Boris Fishman, author of A Replacement Life
What did writing the novel teach you?
My next book will be titled Zen and the Art of Novel-Writing. Like any beginner, I was anxious. Very earnestly, I mapped the whole thing out in advance. But when you've got it all mapped out, there's no chance for the characters and plot to develop lives independent of you, to start telling you how it's going to go - which can give a good novel that sense of both spontaneity and inevitability, and the reader that feeling of I've forgotten I'm reading a novel because this feels like real life. (The irony being, of course, that an author has to warp and distill real life in a hundred ways in order for it to feel like real life on the page.) For instance, my "plan" was for Arianna, Slava Gelman's love interest, to be a much less nuanced version of someone who comes from privilege, but she kept speaking in a different voice. So I went with it. And her portrayal came to feel more interesting and honest for it. Like this, little by little, I let go, I got looser-limbed, I started playing. Writing the novel came to feel like playing - in the most disciplined way. I read this wonderful line once, which I think applies: "art is disciplined abandon."
In addition to its main concerns, the novel seems to be having a conversation between the lines about the way we tell stories - what makes one effective and what makes another fall flat. Can you talk about this?
Since the novel is about the invention of stories of Holocaust suffering, it takes up the question of: What does a narrative need to sound persuasive? Which, of course, is the challenge that the novel faces behind the curtain. As Slava turns these false stories like Rubik's cubes to figure out what will make them sound true, I was trying to understand the same thing. How do I make the novel sound credible? One answer, whether you're inventing restitution claims or fiction, is: Specific detail. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the patriarch of making the incredible credible, put it, you tell people there are elephants flying outside your window and no one will believe you, but you tell them six elephants are flying outside your window, and you've got them.
The ultimate answer for me, however, was: Make the reader wonder what was going to happen next. As one of the characters in the novel says, "Tell them a story [so good] they'll forget to care is it true or not." That's the fiction writer's sleight of hand (when it works). You're pulling all these strings, and the audience knows the puppet's not real, but it doesn't really care, because the show is so good. The show can be good for a whole variety of reasons: I've fallen in love with novels even though they moved slowly because they were written beautifully, or because they had unforgettable characters. But what Slava (and in this sense, if not others, I am his proxy) tries to learn, at least in this novel, is how to tell a good yarn.
You add an Author's Note, which says, in part, "The line between fact and fiction, invention and theft, is as loose as the line between truth and justice..." Why was this important for you to point out?
The things I describe in the novel - mass forgery of Holocaust-restitution claims by Russians in South Brooklyn - "came true," more or less as I imagined it, in 2010, about a year after I started writing. It had been going on since the 1990s - by the time it was exposed, something like $57 million had been obtained illegally from the German government. Public reaction was pretty unqualified; news pieces and comment forums tended to regard the people who had done this as evil.
But I knew the community, and the story felt more complicated than that - morally, if not legally. The people I imagined doing this for the novel, and who had actually been doing it all along in real life - many of them have suffered their whole lives, whether as second-class citizens (because Jews) in the Soviet Union, or as Russians in World War II, or as immigrants at a very advanced age to America. These are people who used to live in a country so abusive of its citizens that, in some cases, you couldn't get enough to get by without cheating.
And then these people came to America, a far more generous place, but at an age when it's very difficult to unlearn decades-old habits. Of course, some engaged in the fraud on base motives, but very often the money meant only that their grandchildren could go to a better college. I don't know if there is ever such a thing as a just fraud - it's one of the questions I wanted the novel to pose - but I do know that there's often quite a bit of daylight between the "facts" and justice, between the law and morality. I wanted the novel to explore this distance.
Who do you hope picks up this novel? What do you hope the book achieves?
I didn't intend A Replacement Life as a novel only for Russophiles, or urbanites, or young men trying to find themselves. I wanted it to be a novel for anyone who's ever had to figure out the distance between the "rules" and what feels just instead; who's wanted to find a way to honor someone whose definition of honor is very different; who's grown up with one set of ideas and then run headlong into the not very pleasant realization that life is about something else entirely. Ultimately, Slava is trying to figure out what it means to be a person. I see that as the most democratic concern possible rather than something elitist. The greatest reward to me would be if this book was picked up, in a Barnes & Noble in suburban New Jersey or in greater Phoenix, by someone who doesn't usually pick up "books like this."
And that goes to the heart of my other great wish, which is to wave the flag high and proudly for good stories. Somewhere along the way, stories - I mean novels where the plot has a fair amount of, let's say, "energy" - became suspect, empty calories in a pretty package meant to seduce a reader unwilling to think harder. Well, Elmore Leonard wrote pretty good stories. So did Dostoevsky. I don't agree that page-turners, by definition, can't maintain high artistic standards; can't challenge us intellectually and morally; can't experiment with form. At least I hope not. I don't know if I succeeded, but it's what I tried to achieve with this novel.
What was the most fun part of the novel to write? What was the hardest part of the experience?
The false narratives submitted by Slava to the German government on behalf of these old Russians in Brooklyn - these were among the most compelling things to write. They poured out of me, and, through 12 drafts, hardly underwent any change - the only parts of the book I can say that for. Perhaps because they represented a liberation. The novel occasionally draws on real-life experiences, but these narratives were complete inventions. They allowed me the thrill of writing out of entirely different lives. I enjoy that thought - the story's "illegal" aspects set me free outside the events of the novel.
The other great piece of fun was to invent characters from scratch. You can't transcribe one-to-one even with a character who borrows from real life - the dramatic demands of a viable character are quite different from what makes a human being. But you're still guided, often invisibly and unhelpfully, by the "facts." These facts are the departure point. There is no departure point with wholly invented characters; you make everything. This is thrilling- if you do it well, you're bringing people to life. What a rush. And what a relief for the beginner's great anxiety - if I can do this from scratch, maybe I'm not such a fraud. The hardest part of the experience was getting the women right. They taught me the most about creating characters. The men sprung more or less fully-formed. The women started as clichés, but through very many iterations, became (I hope) the most three-dimensional characters in the book.
If you could talk to yourself four years ago, when you were about to start the novel, what would you say?
Take a deep breath.
Who have you discovered lately?
I don't have many tips on undeservedly obscure writers - it's all I can do to get to the books that are well-known. Perhaps because I gorged on fiction while working on A Replacement Life, I seem to be in a nonfiction period. Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage- a book about his failure to write a book about D. H. Lawrence - was a revelation. You hardly have to care about D. H. Lawrence - it's a book about all the wonderful dishonesties and imperfections and unconstructive impulses that make us human. It's easily the most honest book I've read in a long time. (This is why I love books: It's someone being honest and undefended in a way that few of us are, as readily, in "real life.")
Well, scratch that: Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work: On Becoming A Mother (my next novel is about an adoption) is probably even more terrifyingly honest. It's a sublime refusal to sanctify motherhood as the breathlessly noble enterprise that we often, I think, insist on imagining it to be.
Then, about ten years too late, I got to Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight, mainly because I've just spent some time in Zimbabwe. What a book. She doesn't analyze. She doesn't judge. She just tells, with incredible lyricism, the story (of growing up with wonderfully unconventional and resourceful, but also racist, parents in Rhodesia). It feels like a novel, unspooling in a never-ending present. It is a novel, in everything but the facts. I love that.
A trio of novelists from around the globe talk about what it means to write across languages, cultures and history. A Discover Great New Writers event.
Each year Barnes & Noble selects a bookshelf’s worth of must-read works for the B&N Discover Great New Writers program. 2014′s summer picks range from searing memoir to black comedy to a fascinating study of bees, and represent some of the most exciting new voices in literature. Don’t miss a single one: The Steady Running of […]
