A Replacement Life
Written by Boris Fishman
Narrated by George Newbern
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him. Slava's turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. 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.
Boris Fishman
Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Travel + Leisure, the London Review of Books, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, among other publications. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, which was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and lives in New York City.
Related to A Replacement Life
Related audiobooks
True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eva The Adventuress: A Romance of a Blighted Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn The Blood Of The Greeks Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnstoppable Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Long Way Home Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The American Way: A True Story of Nazi Escape, Superman, and Marilyn Monroe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBugsy Siegel: The Dark Side of the American Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/512 Years a Slave Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Deathlords Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTotal Blackout Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5History Revealed: 12 Years a Slave: Episode 45 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Passenger: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leaving Eastern Parkway Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The God of that Summer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSergeant York Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Machetes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The King's Assassin: The Secret Plot to Murder King James I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Old Abe: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gringa Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTwelve Years a Slave: The Autobiography of Solomon Northup Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When The Dust Settled: Book Three in a Jewish Family Saga Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Underground Railroad, Part 4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStill Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Border Legion Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Literary Fiction For You
Flowers for Algernon Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Hunger Games Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: A Hunger Games Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All the Sinners Bleed: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lady Tan's Circle of Women Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House in the Cerulean Sea Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Picture of Dorian Gray: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hate U Give Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Road Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Parable of the Sower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tom Lake: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dutch House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anxious People: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yellowface: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stardust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Their Eyes Were Watching God Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for A Replacement Life
37 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slava Gelman is a junior staffer at a magazine that isn't but might as well be The New Yorker, where his assignment is to ferret out and crack wise about absurd news items in small-town newspapers. Slava lives on the Upper East Side, which isn't but might as well be on the other side of the world from "Soviet Brooklyn" where he landed as a child on arrival from Minsk (as did Fishman), where his grandparents still live and which his parents fled for suburban New Jersey. When Slava's grandmother dies, he treks via subway to Brooklyn and before long is trekking regularly, roped by his scheming grandfather into crafting (he's a writer, isn't he?) a fictitious claim to the German government for a slice of the reparations pie earmarked for Holocaust survivors. So what if Grandfather didn't suffer precisely as required to be eligible? Didn't the Germans make sure to kill those who did? So begins Boris Fishman's darkly comic and very impressive debut novel. Fishman pulls off a difficult feat in a first novel, even one so closely grounded in his own experience. He has written a book that is both funny and genuinely moving. The Jews of Brighton Beach, who survived the Nazis and the Soviets through cunning, luck and sheer force of will, are a brilliantly drawn tough lot, re-inventing themselves once again in a place where you can "afford to be decent." Slava wants to free himself from "the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn" and earn a byline by writing elegant prose but in borrowing true elements of his dead grandmother's life to fashion false narratives for his grandfather and his friends, he is drawn more deeply into the past and into the community he has longed to escape. Poor, confused Slava, torn between past and present, loyalty and honor, skinny uptown Arianna and luscious childhood playmate Vera,...Is he being followed? Will his fraud be uncovered? At what cost? Will he do the right thing? I loved this book. Fishman tells a good story, one with moral ambiguity and conflicting loyalties, and his prose crackles with irony and wit. If you were in any danger of thinking that the immigrant experience has been exhaustively mined in fiction, think again. Boris Fishman is a welcome voice and "A Replacement Life" is a wholly original and worthy contribution.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A marvelous debut novel from a writer who recently caught my eye with his riveting memoir called "Savage Feast" (2019). "A Replacement Life" is also quite autobiographical, although the names (and maybe certain other things) are changed. Boris Fishman's talent shines in both works. In this novel, there is a moral dilemma, a love dilemma, an age-old dilemma of belonging and fitting in - for an immigrant (specifically here for an ex-Soviet Jewish person), and all this is crafted, with stirring insight, in the inimitable style of narration that draws you in from page one.Here's an example of a poignant truth about numerous ex-Soviet immigrants in New York (all kinds, not just Jewish), offered by the author so eloquently:"These unlike people had been tossed together like salad by the cupidity of the Soviet government, and now, in America, they were forced to keep speaking Russian, their sole bond, if they wanted to understand each other.... The brethren who had remained in the old world had moved forward in history - they were now citizens of independent countries, their native languages withdrawn from under the rug, buffed, spit-shined, returned to first place, but here in Brooklyn, they were stuck forever in Soviet times. They have gotten marooned on a new island except for what their children would do..."
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I think that it is almost unfair to call this a brilliant debut novel, because in my opinion, Boris Fishman does not write like a debut novelist. Taken at face-value, this story is marvelous, with memorable, powerful, evocative characters and a stirring and gripping plot, not your typical story of immigration by a long shot. This story is one with the literary flavor of the ubiquitous onion, peeling away at multiple layers of one's sense of self, of history, of love, of connection across the generations, of the ability to sacrifice and to use within each person, of the variation in cultural definitions of lies and the truths that matter. On top of all of that, the ending is suspenseful and satisfying, and that is not always seen despite reading a great story, particularly in a debut novel. Upon completion, I can genuinely say that I think I gained some measure of new insight into the heart and mind of a new immigrant to the United States. Just read it!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5first, my thanks to Harper for my advanced reader copy. I had a great time with this novel and have already recommended it to a number of people; I've also put it on the list for my book group to read in 2015. Obviously, I liked it. A lot. Slava Gelman comes from a family of Russian immigrants who had settled in Brooklyn. He'd made a conscious decision to "become an American," to leave his grandfather Yevgeny's "neighborhood of Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians and Uzbeks" and set his sights on working for Century, a longstanding and prestigious magazine, "older than The New Yorker and, despite a recent decline, forever a paragon." Staying in the neighborhood would keep him among the ranks of those who ". . . don't go to America," except for the DMV and Brodvei," or who "shop at marts that sold birch-leafed switches" to "whip yourself in the steam bath and rare Turkish shampoos that reversed baldness . . ." but this is not what Slava wants. He had to leave, in order to"strip from his writing the pollution that repossed it every time he returned to the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn."In short, to write for Century, he had to get away, to "Dialyze himself, like Grandmother's kidneys." So it's off to Manhattan and a sparsely-furnished, affordable studio apartment. As he's about to find out, getting away is not so easy. As the novel opens, it's July, 2006, and just after 5 am, Slava is surprised by the ringing of the telephone. It's not because it's so early, but rather because no one ever calls him, not even his family, since he'd "forbidden" them to call. He doesn't answer it, but the second time it rings, it's his mother telling him that his "grandmother isn't." She'd died alone in the care facility. He hadn't seen Grandmother Sofia for about a month, and now she's gone, and as his mother puts it, it's the family's "first American death." After the funeral, Yevgeny asks him to write a narrative that would allow him to collect reparations as a victim of the Holocaust. He hands Slava an envelope, addressed to Sofia who was registered at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. When Slava notes that this was for his grandmother, not his grandfather, his grandfather tells him to make it up. As he states, "Maybe I didn't suffer in the exact way I need to have suffered ... but they made sure to kill all the people who did. "Eventually Slava gives in, and he starts thinking about all of the things that his grandparents never told him, and how he really knew nothing about his grandmother's life and what she'd gone through. What little he does know goes into the narrative, and the rest, he invents but makes fit the story. His work is so good that word spreads, and Yevgeny pimps him out to write other narratives for friends. Each one builds a little more on the made-up, missing details of Sofia's life, and Slava begins to find it easier to lie, to fabricate, to make stuff up. He gets so good at it that he even starts doing it at his job at Century -- and it spills over into other parts of his life as well. However, the narratives he writes also have a few unintended results for Slava that he probably never could have predicted. A Replacement Life made me laugh out loud in a few spots, especially when it came to the older folk in this book and the insider look at the Russian immigrant culture from someone who is part of it. On the other hand, it's also very touching, not only in terms of family relationships but also because of the history that's recalled in this book. Another positive: the Holocaust is a very large part of this story, but the terrors of the Holocaust, for the most part, are kept in check so you can focus on the modern-day narrative. And I don't understand why people have complained about the writing style: it's obvious that Mr. Fishman enjoys playing with language and playing with other writers' words in his own way. I found it very easy to read in terms of writing and style. This book I can definitely recommend -- and not simply as a summer read.