"Audacious. [A] dazzling tragicomic debut." --Jane Ciabattari, NPR.org "[A] singular debut novel. An ambitious historical fantasy. Evoking the clash of tone and subject found in movies like The Producers and The Great Dictator , The Yid is a screwball farce about atrocity. History here is portrayed as a mad improvisation in which the actors take charge and manically rewrite the script, even as they enact it. Paul Goldberg''s animating intelligence gives all this madness a stunning coherence that, these days, we all too rarely get from either art or life.
" --Maureen Corrigan, NPR''s Fresh Air "Mr. Goldberg has written a book that revolves about Stalin''s final blow against the country''s remaining Jews. Mr. Goldberg comes up with a team of Yiddish-speaking jokester-superheroes who are at the heart of his story, and who make it their mission to avenge countless acts of anti-Semitism, both real and anticipated. The Yid is about Stalin''s worst enemy as well as his favorite prey. Mr. Goldberg fuses these characters and all that they suggest to Stalin--Paul Robeson for Lewis, Anna Akhmatova for one of the book''s women--into one hellish vision to haunt that dictator during his last hours on earth." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times " The Yid is darkly playful and generous with quick insights into the vast weirdness of its landscape.
" --Glen David Gold, The Washington Post "This novel''s black humor is surpassed only by its historical audacity and literary fearlessness. If you''re looking for the next "Catch-22," it may be for you." --Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette " The Yid [is a] rollicking romp of a novel. In something like the mode of writer-director Quentin Tarantino in his films Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained , Goldberg offers The Yid as a literary score-settling machine: a way for one of history''s most brutal villains to receive a kind of cosmic comeuppance at the hands of those he victimized in real life. The difference is that unlike Tarantino, whose revenge fantasies undercut their higher purpose with an excess of sensational violence, Goldberg is less interested in the body than he is in the soul. The Yid is as hilarious as it is appalling, and vice versa." --Kevin Nance, Chicago Tribune "Wily, rambunctiously entertaining [with] irresistible characters. Goldberg''s rapier-like, galvanizing novel unwinds in three acts punctuated by hilarious, flashing, and slashing dialogue as these rebels of temperaments deliberate and impulsive, skills invaluable and surprising, and memories painful and inspiriting, banter, lewdly insult each other, and argue over Shakespeare, Pushkin, Akhmatova, medical ethics, the broken promise of socialism, anti-Semitism, and racism.
Goldberg deftly presents plays within plays, in which his heroic, smart, acerbic, wildly improvising, cool-under-fire characters use stagecraft to attempt an impossible mission. Goldberg ingeniously captures the brutality and lunacy of Stalin''s rule as well as Russia''s stoicism in this spectacularly incisive, humanizing, and comedically cathartic theater of the absurd." --Donna Seaman, Booklist (STARRED REVIEW) "Breathtaking." -- Publishers Weekly "[A] fantastical (and fantastic) debut novel. Highly recommended for readers with a grasp of history who enjoy imaginative deviations from what we think we know as historical truth." --Edward B. Cone, Library Journal (STARRED REVIEW) " The Yid is a quirky mixture of tones, blending the somber import of Bernard Malamud''s The Fixer with the madcap humor of Gary Shteyngart." --Mark Athitakis, Kirkus "A brilliant novel that is at once surreally comic, suspenseful -- if slightly cracked -- and punctuated with eruptions of violence, but with a poignant ending.
An extraordinary, rich and surprising tale of intrigue. Paul Goldberg has been aptly compared to a whole constellation of Jewish literary geniuses -- Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, E.L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon and even the Coen brothers. (I would hasten to add Mordecai Richler to the list.) And The Yid is proof that he surely belongs in their lofty ranks. But it is also true that Goldberg possesses a voice and vision that are entirely and uniquely his own." --Jonathan Kirsch, The Jewish Journal "Blending historical figures and the scope of Shakespeare, this is a take on history unlike any other.
" -- Vol.1 Brooklyn "A bizarre and wonderfully discursive novel. a tour de force of riotous humor set in the dark and blood-stained Soviet Union of the 1950s when Stalin''s periodic paranoia and murderous anti-Semitism reemerge. With Kafka, as with more contemporary Jewish writers like Joseph Heller, Michael Chabon and Nathan Englander, we have become familiar with literature that successfully blends murder with mirth, and the hilarious with the horrific. We may be discomfited by such a mix, but Paul Goldberg, like the circle of gifted writers he has joined, has crafted a compelling and serious novel that does not trivialize the treacherous." --Gerald Sorin, Haaretz "Goldberg packs layers of meaning and atmosphere into the story, deftly blending humor and horror. Goldberg''s achievement in The Yid transcends the misery and evil he portrays. Just as Shakespeare inserts jesters among the gore of his tragedies, Goldberg has constructed a tragedy instead of a travesty of the human spirit.
He never lets his characters give up hope of solving their predicament. Despite the horrors he shows us, we ought not look away." --Stephanie Shapiro, The Buffalo News "Most fiction and nonfiction accounts of Stalin-era arrests go like this: The secret police come in the night and take the accused away in a Black Maria, to never be seen again. The neighbors sit by quietly, pretending not to have heard a thing. Mr. Goldberg amends this with a very American sensibility, replacing fear and submission with Tarantino-esque swagger. The Yid is a literary relative of an action flick and like a good action flick, it''s a morality tale. What carries The Yid is the strength of its premise: It allows for the possibility of resistance instead of resignation in the face of tyranny.
" --Anya Ulinich, The Wall Street Journal "No act of violence, no sacred subject, no reference high or low escapes Goldberg''s manic, discursive delight in this novel of an old Jewish stage actor and the unlikely troupe he assembles to assassinate Joseph Stalin." -- O, The Oprah Magazine "[A] vivid and whip-smart look at the Cold War and its implications for our world today." --Patrik Henry Bass, Essence "Seriously funny, absurd and violent." --Glenn C. Altschuler, Jerusalem Post "An absorbing historical page-turner that somehow wrings delight from the terrible. Goldberg pushes and pulls history as needed to work his magic. It''s a good story, but what makes this such a terrific book is the author''s confident mastery of the world he immerses us in, the fascinating and tragic back stories he weaves with little loss of narrative momentum, and his conspiratorial relationship to the reader. The narrator''s knowing presence is one of several factors, including dialogue presented as if in a play, that gives us the feeling we are not so much reading a novel as attending a live performance.
" --Daniel Akst, Newsday "One of the most distinctive and curious aspects of The Yid is its odd balance between seriousness and comedy. Have you had that experience of reading The New Yorker , where you''re in the middle of a searing article about, say, Stalin''s anti-Semitism, and you''re struck by the incongruity of there being a silly little cartoon of a talking dog in the middle of the page? The evocation of that feeling seems to be not just a major characteristic of The Yid , but its animating impulse." --Josh Lambert, Moment "In The Yid , preparations for the pogrom are described with persuasive vividness. Goldberg painfully evokes the anti-Semitic atmosphere in which Stalin''s pogrom would have been conducted. The testimony of what observers saw and what they believed is a key tool in our understanding of the past. There is little in The Yid , at least in regard to the plans for the pogrom, that doesn''t show up in the accounts of what Soviet Jews feared. By putting these apprehensions and rumors, bland official announcements readable only between the lines, and whispered retellings of overheard conversations into a novel, Goldberg forges a coherent narrative that makes Stalin''s pogrom seem almost inevitable." --Ken Kalfus, The New Yorker Page-Turner "On one level, The Yid , Goldberg''s first novel, is a tribute to the millions who were exiled and murdered during Stalin''s ruthless three-decade reign.
On another, it''s a celebration of Jewish humor, theater and language--Yiddish is sprinkled throughout the book, and, in choosing the title, Goldberg reclaims the word "yid" from those who''ve used it as a slur. These are weighty themes, but The Yid wears them with style, because it also happens to be a satisfying thriller. This is also an improbably funny book. The Yid is a bracing fictional take on a crucial moment in history." --Kevin Canfield, The Star Tribune "Provocative. Imagine a Solzhenitsyn tale set in the lethal Soviet world, but restyled by Larry David. Remarkable." --Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel "If a plot by two ag.