RaveThe Jewish Book CouncilThe author’s new collection, Immigrant City, deepens his exploration of Jewish diasporic themes of displacement and movement, memory and nostalgia ... The two longest stories, \'A Gravestone for an Old Grave\' and \'The Russian Riviera\' are tour de force performances that both summarize and deepen the key themes in Immigrant City ... The stories gathered in Immigrant City continue David Bezmozgis’s project of sounding the emotional depths in the immigrant encounter with a bewildering, often humiliating new world, where the past is shrouded in secrets, buried under layers of repression. \'What did I stand to gain by scavenging through the past?\' Bezmozgis’s fictional grandson asks. In stories filled with compassion for both the dead and the living, Immigrant City offers moving, richly imagined answers to this cosmic question.
Boris Fishman
PositiveJewish Book CouncilIn A Replacement Life, literary journalist Boris Fishman’s ambitious first novel, we enter a richly comic world of aging Russian Jewish immigrants, still fierce in their will to survive after so much misery wrought by Hitler and Stalin, and their spiritually lost new world grandchildren, displaced from the cradle of Brooklyn...to Manhattan, struggling to locate themselves, to figure out a city that remains alien and bewildering. Fishman’s achievement in A Replacement Life is how he evokes — summons — Slava’s awakened filiality ... In Fishman’s moving conclusion, Slava seems cleansed, ready to move on, his soft twenty-first century life \'replaced\' by the rigor of history and memory, embodied in the figure of his grandmother.
