A review by abookishtype
A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman

3.0

Around the time of his grandmother’s death, Slava Gelman’s grandparents received a letter from an agency in Germany that is paying reparations to people who were incarcerated in concentration camps, ghettos, and forced labor battalions. The whole family knows that Mrs. Gelman lived in the Minsk Ghetto, but they don’t know much more than that. She never spoke of it. But her husband, Yevgeny, decides that Slava can write back to this agency claiming that he (Yevgeny) was in the ghetto. Yevgeny suffered, too, he argues, and the Germans were responsible. This is where Boris Fishman’s ethically sticky novel, A Replacement Life, begins. Unfortunately for Slava, things get even more complicated after this...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.