The Yid

"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."