A Replacement Life: A Novel

<p>Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award</p><p>Winner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal</p><p>Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award</p><p>A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.</p><p>Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, &quot;didn't suffer in the exact way&quot; he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has - as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn't his grandson a &quot;writer&quot;?</p><p>High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him - Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American - but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.</p><p>Slava's turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family.</p><p>A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.</p>