The Yid
by Paul Goldberg
Buy on Amazon"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.…
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"Paul Goldberg’s audacious first novel begins after midnight on Feb. 24, 1953, when a state security officer and two soldiers in a Black Maria — a car used to transport prisoners through the night — attempt to arrest a Red Army veteran and onetime Moscow State Jewish Theater actor named Solomon Shimonovich Levinson. When they arrive, Levinson performs for them as if in a vaudeville skit, first baffling his antagonists, then killing all three in a theatrical stunt he calls a “pirouette with smallswords,” before gathering an “ensemble of actors” and setting off in the Black Maria on a journey to assassinate Stalin. Goldberg, a Russian emigre to the U.S. in 1973 whose parents’ names were on Stalin’s lists, draws upon historic fact in this tragicomic tour de force."
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