A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman

Criminal Attachments: Immigration, Family, and Fraud in Soviet Brooklyn
Boris Fishman’s dark new novel explores the tensions between a grandson and his elders as he evolves into an American

Slava Gelman, a twentysomething aspiring writer, is trying to claw his way out of the post-Soviet Brooklyn neighborhood of his family. But his grandfather is determined to pull him back in. He wants to enlist Slava to invent life stories for Soviet émigrés in the hopes of getting money from the claims conference for Holocaust survivors, despite the fact that technically these émigrés are not survivors.

A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman