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.
