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Harper
June 2014
On Sale: June 3, 2014
336 pages
ISBN: 0062287877
EAN: 9780062287878
Kindle: B00FJ37CJ0
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
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.
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