"A Replacement Life" by Boris Fishman *****

• Book Club selection for September 2015
• Russian author
• Debut novel
• Originally published in 2015
• Setting: New York City, summer of 2006
• Characters:
• Slava:  protagonist, writer, forger of remuneration letters
• Grandfather:  "a child of other people's gardens", wheeler dealer, survived by lying
• Mother:  "...had taken from Grandmother the condiments without the meal."
• Arianna:  Co-worker, lover, expects American version of honesty
• Vera:  Russian girl, met Slava in Italy and again in NY, favors lying for a bigger good
• Israel:  1st letter, became symbolic of all the others to Slava, joyful city tour
• Otto:  German administrator:  figured out the scam, baits Slava
• Vocabulary:
• demotic: of or relating to the ordinary, everyday, current form of a language, vernacular:
• ferrier:  a ferryman
• Epigraph:  "All writing is revenge." - Reinaldo Arenas
• Quotes:
• p.2..."Your grandmother isn't.....".....unique death announcement
• p.9..."Like a Soviet high-rise, each floor of Berta was stuffed beyond capacity."
• p.9..."This--more than the profusion of meat in American supermarkets, the open availability of rare technology, even the cavalierness with which Americans spoke of their president--was the mysterious grandeur of the country that had taken in the Gelmans of Minsk.  It had the power to turn tormentors into kitchen help."
• p.10..."Our great realizations are slow dishes, but once they're ready, they announce themselves as suddenly as an oven timer."
• p.10..."If he wanted to live among those who said "we don't go to America" except for the DMV and Brodvei."
• p.46..."...until they left the place that was soaked with the blood of her family for a place that meant nothing to her except what it would do for her grandson, for whom she had lived since the moment she had approached Zhenya Gelman at the Spartak Dance Club in 1945 and said can you help."
• p.79..."The bar drinkers were undermining their noble solitude by staring into the blue screens of cell phones."
• p.103..."The broom f the seasons was starting to sweep summer under the rug."
• p.117..."It's got that silence of ours.  That terrible Russian silence that Americans don't understand.  They are always making noise because they need to forget life is going to end.  But we remember, and so we have silence, even when we're shouting and laughing."
• p.117..."But you need more than that.  Nice sentences is like a beautiful woman who doesn't know how to cook.  It's not your story.  Forget about yourself for a moment."
• p.159..."These unlike people had been tossed together like salad by the cupidity of the Soviet government, and now, in America, they were forced to keep speaking Russian, their sole bond, if they wanted to understand each other, and they did, because a Ukrainian's hate of a Russian was still warmer than his love of an American."
• p.160..."How cheaply they fell--the heart's greatest terrors or a bushel of euros.  Slava wasn't a judge:  He was a middleman, a loan shark, an alchemist--he turned lies into facts, words into money, silence into knowledge at last."
• p.167..."...he could draw off the sense of home she felt in the city, the way poor people in poor countries got light by siphoning from the municipal wires."
• p.206..."Of you wanted to write a good story, the fact had to become a story's instruments.  You couldn't write without being coarse to the facts."....?
• p.214..."However, the stories came out better if he didn't know everything in advance."
• p.234..."Compliance with instructions--just say what the rules were--was a molecularly satisfying as a cool plum on a hot day."
• p.234..."After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table."
• p.235..."Grandfather had passed down his fraudulent soul?  Slava was a pinkie on Grandfather's hand, no more."
• p.254..."I am a finished man...But you are quite a different matter:  God has prepared a life for you...Become a sun and everyone will see you.  The sun must be the sun first of all."....Otto to Slava
• p.257..."The suffering of your grandparents belongs to you not any more than I belong to the crimes of my father."...Otto to Slava..German to Russian
• p.272...."For a person like Grandmother, there was no law but what we find in each other.....Slava lived in a different country.  A lie meant something different here, even if it was easier to pull off thanks to the American insistence on imagining the best about the next person.".....naivete?  wisdom?
• p.275...He had survived the war at the price of punishing himself for the rest of his life with the lie that had made it possible."....Grandfather
• p.276..."At every step, everyone had lied about everything so the one truth at the heart of it all--that abused people might flee the place of abuse--could be told."
• p.276..."Grandfather was already a liar--this kind of liar--when he twirled his finger in his temple that afternoon in Vienna, and Slava was young enough to understand such lies as a better kind of truth.  It wasn't until they'd come to America that the truth started to mean exactly what was said and not something else.  The calculus had changed in America."
• Notes:
• Title...p.167......the fictitious lives of Slava's letters
• Review:  I think that it is almost unfair to call this a brilliant debut novel, because in my opinion, Boris Fishman does not write like a debut novelist.  Taken at face-value, this story is marvelous, with memorable, powerful, evocative characters and a stirring and gripping plot, not your typical story of immigration by a long shot. This story is one with the literary flavor of the ubiquitous onion, peeling away at multiple layers of one's sense of self, of history, of love, of connection across the generations, of the ability to sacrifice and to use within each person, of the variation in cultural definitions of lies and the truths that matter.  On top of all of that, the ending is suspenseful and satisfying, and that is not always seen despite reading a great story, particularly in a debut novel.  Upon completion, I can genuinely say that I think I gained some measure of new insight into the heart and mind of a new immigrant to the United States. Just read it!