Paul Goldberg's debut novel, The Yid, is a wildly imaginative account of Josef Stalin's death that combines elements of drama, thriller and farce into an energetic alternate history of the dictator's demise.
In the depths of a Moscow winter in February 1953, all but a few of the Soviet Union's some two million Jews are unaware that a plan for mass deportations and executions will soon be set into motion. But retired Yiddish theater actor Solomon Levinson, physician Aleksandr Kogan and Yiddish-speaking African American engineer Friederich Lewis, who's fled the racism of his native Omaha for the Soviet Promised Land, are about to improvise a desperate scheme to thwart Stalin's plan to launch "a Kristallnacht times ten, or times a hundred!"
These unlikely co-conspirators prove remarkably adept at the swift, savage, but balletic, violence necessary to work their way methodically (if, on occasion, accidentally) toward Stalin's dacha. But for all their single-minded determination to assassinate the Soviet leader, Levinson, Kogan and Lewis can't help but reflect on their shared disillusionment with life under the Communist regime.
Goldberg, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union at age 14 in 1973, draws on his own family members and their stories to give the novel an air of verisimilitude, despite its fantastical elements. The death of Josef Stalin on March 5, 1953, four days after he suffered an apparent stroke, was much more prosaic than the account Paul Goldberg has created in this vivid novel. The Yid offers an opportunity to contemplate what one tyrant's end might have been like if justice ever truly were poetic. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer