Paul Goldberg’s novel The
Yid offers up an unusual angle on Stalin’s Russia: Goldberg begins the book
on February 24, 1953, sending a Black Maria with attendant staff to arrest one
Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, “an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater.”
Everything goes topsy-turvy in Levinson’s apartment—and, really, in the rest of
the novel, just as things have gone topsy-turvy in the USSR over the last
several decades—thanks to Levinson’s skill with sharp objects. And so. What
does a non-state actor (sorry for the pun!) do with dead bodies killed
unofficially? And how might a non-state actor (meaning someone like Levinson)
and his buddies try to combat Stalin? This second question is a new variation
on the age-old burning question of “What is to be done?”
The fun of The Yid,
which looks at the horrors of fascism, racism, and the Soviet past, isn’t just
its element of something akin to an almost gleeful alternative history, it’s in
its telling. Even more so for a reader like me who so loves to have a writer
guide her through a book. The Yid may
be Goldberg’s debut novel—he said in an appearance at Print Bookstore in
Portland a couple weeks ago that he’s written other, unpublished, fiction—but
he makes masterful use of language and literary devices as he establishes an
absurd world that blends historical truth (and even historical characters,
something I think very, very few writers do successfully) with a fictional world
that’s extraordinarily playful and theatrical, drawing, among other things on
Shakespeare’s King Lear.
Three early examples. Goldberg begins with a trilingual epigraph from Shmuel Halkin’s Bar-Kokhba (Moscow State Jewish Theater, 1938), very shortly thereafter calls the first
part of his book “Act I,” and defines certain terms in his second
paragraph:
A Black Maria is a distinctive piece of urban transport, chernyy voron, a vehicle that collects its passengers for reasons not necessarily political. The Russian people gave this ominous carriage a diminutive name: voronok, a little raven, a fledgling.
By page nine, he’s already blending Yiddish, Russian, and
English in ways that made me happy as both a reader and a translator. Just
scroll down to “Dos bist du?” in this
excerpt on the Jewish Book Council site for a sample. The words are
playing, the characters are playing, and Goldberg is again showing his readers
how to read his book. This time, there’s a crude rhyme that involves two languages; Goldberg even offers an explicit explanation. (Side note: I think Goldberg
makes wonderful use of Russian mat,
obscenities, in The Yid.) There’s an
obvious obviousness and staginess throughout the book that sometimes extends to
(oh, here’s a random find, flipping the pages) a bit of a soliloquy from
Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, presented in
both transliterated Russian and Anthony Wood’s English translation. Late in the
book there’s also a mention of how historian Edvard Radzinsky covers “the
events at Stalin’s dacha in the early morning of March 1, 1953.” All of that,
plus, of course, Goldberg’s abundant humor, remind the reader not to take this
world too literally… all while taking its tragicomedy, absurdity, and historical
mayhem and reality very seriously. I’ve been a sucker for that paradox for years.
I enjoyed The Yid
very much as a reader but I think I enjoyed it even more as a translator
because I love observing how writers handle dialogue with multiple languages. I
particularly appreciated Goldberg’s combination of translations, transliterations,
and original language because, yes, dear readers, he shows that these things can work together. There
was even a practical element for me, in noting the words Goldberg uses to refer
to unfortunate features of the Stalin era, things that are in Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, which I’m
translating: cattle cars, guards, transit prisons, deportees… There are, of
course, plenty of books containing those words, but something about Goldberg’s
lively combination of English, Russian, and Yiddish really won me over, even
more so because he also blends genres, temporal settings (I didn’t even get to
that!), cultures (or that!), and so much damn sad history into around 300
pages. I’m looking forward to his next novel.
For more:
- The novel’s Web page.
- A brief (local!) TV interview with Paul Goldberg about his childhood, the basic plot of the novel, Moscow, and the novel’s genesis. (The interview takes place at Print.)
- An essay on Slate.com by Goldberg, about the book’s title.
- A lengthy interview with Goldberg on Electric Lit.
- Goldberg’s acknowledgements from The Yid, which refer to many of the elements from life and literature—including Fadeev’s The Rout—that inspired the book.
- The Jewish Book Council’s discussion guide for The Yid, PDF here.
- Paul Goldberg’s other books.
Disclaimers: I
received a copy of The Yid from the
publisher, Picador; thank you to James Meader for sending a copy of the book,
which he also edited, as Goldberg’s acknowledgements note. With all its
languages and references, I’m sure The
Yid presented a slew of editing challenges. Kudos to Meader and the rest
of the editorial team for their work.
Up Next: Sergei
Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope, which I
loved for being a book about nearly everything that matters in this world, then Valery Zalotukha’s
The Last Communist, which I’m
enjoying very much because (about half-way in, anyway) it’s succeeding at the
opposite feat and feels almost like chamber theater about post-Soviet Russia,
focusing on a wealthy family in a small city… I’m not sure about conquering
Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Adoration of the Magi:
though I enjoyed some individual passages, the novel lacks, hmm, narrative
drive and 100 pages felt like several hundred more. That means that reading
six more hundreds of pages feels nigh on impossible right now. Though
far, far stranger things have happened.
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