The Yid

October 26, 2015
Goldberg’s lively first novel imagines Soviet history as a violent farce that averts a tragedy for Russia’s Jews. The titular “Yid” is Solomon Levinson, a deadly, buffoonish member of a disbanded Yiddish theater company who likens himself to the puppet Petrushka, a “sad, angry clown battling the forces of history.” In the novel’s breathtaking opening, Levinson verbally duels with, and then brutally dispatches, three soldiers sent to capture him as part of a pogrom in 1953. Stalin, a paranoid “alter kaker” holed up in his country dacha, has given orders to “forever rid the Motherland” of its Jewish population. Levinson decides that the only hope for him and Soviet Jews is to stage a play of his own that deposes the genocidal tyrant. The slightly unhinged director, for whom the lines between stage and reality are blurred, assembles a cast to aid him in his improvised plot, including an accomplished doctor, an orphaned young woman, and an African-American Communist disillusioned at finding the same racism in Soviet Russia as he did in Jim Crow America. Divided into three acts, the novel zips along even as Goldberg smuggles in a healthy dose of fascinating Soviet history—its revolutionaries, artists, absurdities, and poisonous anti-Semitism. The result is a stretch of fictionalized history so fully realized it feels as though it actually happened.

November 15, 2015
In Goldberg's debut, set in 1953, a pair of offbeat Jewish characters and an American Negro come to terms with life, death, and theater as Stalin's final pogrom gains steam. Divided into three "acts," the book opens with an early-morning knock on the door of Levinson, a frail old veteran of the Red Army and the now-defunct State Jewish Theater. Surprised at how open Levinson is to their visit, a state security official and two soldiers quickly discover he is no harmless clown via his sudden "pirouette with Finnish daggers." A short time later, Levinson joins up with Kogan, a noted surgeon he knows from the army, and Lewis, a black friend who came to the Soviet Union from the United States for a factory job, to dispose of the three dead bodies, get rid of a black security van, and make plans to assassinate Stalin. The killings become an excuse for them to trade mortal visions, political philosophies, and especially tales of the days when Levinson, dubbed "the janitor of human souls," took a back seat to the great actor Solomon Mikhoels, who, before his murder in 1948, was director of the Jewish Theater. Largely based on stories passed down by the author's father and grandfather, the book contains facts that still unsettle. You could squeeze 60 people into a single cattle car "if you don't care how many of them are still breathing upon arrival," the 400,000 Jewish citizens of Moscow into 130 trains, and the entire Jewish population of the USSR into 730 trains. But this sophisticated entertainment transcends historical detail with flighty dialogue exchanges that, presented in script style, seem like a cross between Samuel Beckett and Sholem Aleichem. References to other real-life figures, including Paul Robeson and Marc Chagall, add to the color. For all its dark, discursive content, Goldberg's novel about unlikely rebels plotting Stalin's downfall is streaked with hard-earned wisdom.

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Starred review from September 1, 2015

Moscow-born Goldberg, a reporter and nonfiction author who immigrated to the United States in 1973, offers an imaginative and blackly funny debut novel about the Soviet Union in early 1953. Stalin is planning a final pogrom to rid the USSR of Jews, but he doesn't reckon with wily Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an old-time actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater, who rallies some friends in a little plot to assassinate Stalin. [See review, p. 91.]

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2015
Paul Goldberg emigrated from Moscow to the U.S. at 14 in 1973 and became a reporter focused on Soviet dissidents and cancer research. His firsthand knowledge of Soviet life and his medical expertise inform The Yid, his wily, rambunctiously entertaining first novel about an unlikely group of valorous would-be assassins and one of history's most alarming close calls. A clue to the modus operandi of his tale's irresistible characters is found in Goldberg's journalistic agility and tenacity, which inspired the New York Times to describe him as a Russian emigre with a quirky sense of humor and a thirst for the jugular. In late February 1953, a Soviet security detail is on a routine late-night run to arrest a Jew, an old Yid, Solomon Levinson, once an actor at the celebrated Moscow State Yiddish Theater. Tall, thin, and leaning on a cane, he's an easy mark, if only he would stop talking. Friederich Lewis is an engineer from Omaha and a rare being in the USSR, an African American, leading to his often being hailed as Paul Robeson. When Lewis arrives at his longtime friend Levinson's apartment later that night, the Yid is still in full performance mode and quickly recruits Lewis for a mission that grows more ambitious, dangerous, and outrageous by the minute. This unlikely duo is soon joined by Aleksandr Kogan, a surgeon who, like Levinson, served in the Red Army. He is also targeted for arrest as part of Stalin's Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a genocidal scheme involving the spreading of lies about syringe-wielding Jewish killer doctors, fear-mongering calculated to whip up enough anti-Semitic frenzy to fuel a massive pogrom followed by the deportation of any Jewish survivors to the Siberian Arctic. As the number of Levinson's motley followers grows, so, too, does the body count. Goldberg's rapier-like, galvanizing novel unwinds in three acts punctuated by hilarious, flashing, and slashing dialogue as these rebels of temperaments deliberate and impulsive, skills invaluable and surprising, and memories painful and inspiriting, banter, lewdly insult each other, and argue over Shakespeare, Pushkin, Akhmatova, medical ethics, the broken promise of socialism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Ultimately, they decide that there is only one thing to do: come up with a plan to kill Stalin before he annihilates more than two millions Jews. As the doomsday clock runs down, Goldberg deftly presents plays within plays, in which his heroic, smart, acerbic, wildly improvising, cool-under-fire characters use stagecraft to attempt an impossible mission. Goldberg ingeniously captures the brutality and lunacy of Stalin's rule as well asRussia's stoicism in this spectacularly incisive, humanizing, and comedically cathartic theater of the absurd.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)