When Boris Fishman began writing “A Replacement Life,” his award-nominated debut novel about a frustrated writer who forges Holocaust restitution claims for Soviet Jews in Brooklyn, he had no idea that the premise of his work-in-progress was playing out in real time.
In the fall of 2009, while Fishman was at work on a first draft, a cadre of Russian-Jewish employees of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany — the group responsible for distributing restitution funds to Holocaust survivors — was doing in the real world precisely what his protagonist, 25-year-old Slava Gelman, was doing in the fictional world: appropriating bits of lives and creating falsehoods.
The primary difference, however, is that Slava, a junior editor at Century — a prestigious midtown magazine that smacks of The New Yorker (where Fishman himself was once a fact-checker) — does not get paid for his trouble. In fact, Slava, whose career is going nowhere, does it for the glory and to be closer to his grandmother, Sofia, who dies before he has a chance to mine her stories.
It is no coincidence that Fishman, 35, a Soviet-Jewish immigrant whose maternal grandmother survived the Minsk Ghetto, actually filled out his grandmother’s restitution forms in the mid-1990s, less than a decade after he and his family arrived in America from the former Soviet Union.
“What struck me,” said Fishman, who will be appearing on Feb. 12 at American Jewish University and on Feb. 16 at Vroman’s Bookstore, “was that the application didn’t require much documentation. The thought I had was, ‘My God, it’s a matter of time before someone has a field day with these applications.’ It comes down to whether or not you can tell a good story.”
Having grown up in a community of gifted storytellers, he understood that the chances of that occurring were indeed high. Fishman, who now lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, said that while the perpetrators of the real-life crime clearly abused the system, he is not willing to dismiss them as “pure evil.”
“These people were second-class citizens because they were Jews,” Fishman said. “And for anyone, the former Soviet Union was a rough place to live. Sometimes you couldn’t get basic things without knowing someone, or without paying extra on the side.”
Slava’s colorful grandfather, Yevgeny Gelman, is known to his fellow Russians as “a child of other people’s gardens.” Famous for acquiring caviar, cognac and minks — luxuries afforded only to high-ups in the Communist Party — he once taped 15 sticks of salami into his overcoat on a hot day and distributed them to agents of influence, including his daughter’s kindergarten teacher and “the woman in ticketing at the Aeroflot office on Karl Marx Street.”
Not surprisingly, it’s also Yevgeny who initiates the restitution scheme when he asks his literary-minded grandson to forge his own claim upon receiving an application letter for his late wife. But unlike his late wife — who, like Fishman’s real-life grandmother, survived the Minsk Ghetto — Yevgeny dodged the Red Army draft and sat out the war in Uzbekistan.
It is this gray area, this land of moral ambiguity, that most interests Fishman. No, Yevgeny was not a Holocaust survivor per se, but as a Jew in the former Soviet Union, he certainly saw his fair share of suffering. “Maybe I didn’t suffer in the exact way I needed to have suffered,” he tells Slava, “but they made sure to kill all the people who did.”
This sentiment ultimately convinces Slava to set aside his inhibitions and forge his grandfather’s claim. Before he knows it, scores of elderly Russian Jews, referred by Yevgeny, are clamoring for his skills. Spurred on by the egoistic satisfaction of people actually asking him to write — he can’t get a story published in Century, where his primary task is to scan local newspapers for flubbed copy and make fun of them — Slava spins dozens upon dozens of tales.
Fishman skillfully conjures a host of outrageous Russian-Jewish characters — among them a man who renames himself Israel, devastated by his son’s sudden religiosity and move to the state — but he dazzles most when writing about Slava’s relationship with Arianna Bock, the voluptuous, whip-smart fact-checker who sits in the cubicle next to him.
“She introduces him to the guiding idea of the novel, which is that life is spent in the gray,” Fishman said. “At the start of the novel, Slava is an emotional fundamentalist. He thinks, ‘Am I Russian? Or am I American? Is this just? Or unjust?’ She introduces him to the idea that almost everything is always a little bit of both.”
Fishman’s second novel, slated for publication in 2016, parses very different territory. Titled “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” the story revolves around a Russian-immigrant couple from New Jersey who adopt a child from Montana; the child turns out to be “feral,” in Fishman’s words, setting the stage for a 42-year-old woman’s soul-searching journey in Big Sky Country.
“I didn’t want to write another book from the perspective of a Russian-Jewish male,” Fishman said. “It’s good for one book, but I didn’t want to lean on it.”
