A Replacement Life

Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

Winner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award

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.

Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, didn t suffer in the exact way 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 writer ?

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.

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.

A Replacement Lifeis a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice."