A REPLACEMENT LIFE by Boris Fishman

Slava Gelman’s grandmother has just died.  She escaped a Jewish ghetto in Minsk, Belarus, at the age of 15.  Now it’s 2006, and she is eligible for restitution from the German government, if only she were still alive.  Slava’s grandfather wants to claim the benefits in his late wife’s stead, even though he is not eligible, and he knows just the person to fabricate his whereabouts during the war.  Slava is on the staff of a New York magazine, but he never actually writes anything.  At first he is alarmed by his grandfather’s suggestion that he pen some fiction on his behalf, but then Slava warms to the idea as a way to honor his grandmother’s suffering.  Things spiral out of hand, as Slava finds his talent in demand, when his grandfather’s friends seek him out to fabricate stories for them as well.  Slava has a certain amount of ambivalence about how he is attempting to bilk the German government, but he enjoys this work more than his unchallenging paying job.  He becomes romantically involved with the woman in the adjacent cubicle, whose job is, ironically, fact-checking.  He hilariously interrogates her about how she goes about her job without disclosing why he suddenly has an interest in exposing fraudulent copy.  I loved the storyline, but I was never really sure in which direction Slava’s moral compass was pointed.  More annoying was how the narrative was a little jumpy, and sometimes my mind did not make the leap immediately.  On the whole, though, the premise is fascinating from both an ethical and a literary standpoint, and the writing is superb.