Daniel Stein, Interpreter

February 28, 2011
In her fourth book to be translated into English (for which Tait won the PEN Literature in Translation award), Ulitskaya weaves a dense narrative of the lives touched by Br. Daniel Stein. Ulitskaya's (The Funeral Party) ambitious effort is a kind of case file composed of conversations, lectures, sermons, and excerpts from letters, diaries, and news articles. The story begins in 1942 in Belorussia, where Stein, a clandestine Polish Jew pressed into service by the Germans, secretly helps 300 Jews escape the ghetto. After the war he converts to Catholicism, becomes a priest, and moves to Israel, where he influences the lives of many over a number of years. With warmth and intelligence, Stein addresses life's great challenges and the complexities of faith, though not everyone is pleased with his unorthodox views. Ulitskaya's story of one man's devotion to bridging the divide between Christianity and Judaism in the Holy Land raises complex theological, moral, and emotional questions. Sympathetic characters (many drawn from real life) and a layered structure allows the tension of these myriad lives to emerge naturally.

March 15, 2011
Ulitskaya is Russias best-selling novelist, and Daniel Stein, Interpreter has something for everyone. A docudrama, a postmodern epistolary novel, it tells the true story of the improbable, heroic life of a Polish Jew who translates for the Gestapo, saves part of a ghetto, escapes execution, hides in a convent, converts to Catholicism, joins the partisans, emigrates to Israel, and refounds the Church of St. James, a community for which he performs mass in Hebrew. He offends church officials and violates orthodoxies, but Daniel is a sort of saint, doing the work of Christ. Two popes and a terrorist make cameo appearances. The story is breathless, the style curious, like Hollywood gangsters speaking broken English with the accents of their countries of origin. Despite the intrusion of some unpleasant historical facts, that good triumphs over evil and over truth is the books truism. The author appears at one point and offers this fair assessment, I am not a real writer and this book is not a novel but a collage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)