This novel tells the luminous, wonderfully melodramatic tale of a Jewish boy in Imperial Russia kidnapped from a shtetl to fulfill another boy's term of service in the czar's army.
"Neugeboren has written good novels before—I think of Big Man and An Orphan s Tale—but they did not prepare me for this excellence, this landscape of angry beginnings."—The New York Times
"A novel rich in telling tales, stories soaked in feeling and supported by intelligence."—The Boston Globe
"Beguiling and challenging! A rare mix of irony and wit."—The Philadelphia Inquirer
When Nathan Malkin returns to New York from premature retirement in Israel, he comes bearing a heavy baggage of memory-insistent recollections of his parents’ bitter marriage, of the tragic deaths of his wife and only son, and of his strange, guiltridden relationship with a deranged, now deceased brother, Nachman.
Central to Malkin’s schemes is The Stolen Jew, a famous novel he wrote many years back that tells the luminous, wonderfully melodramatic tale of a Jewish boy in Imperial Russia kidnapped from a shtetl to fulfill another boy’s term of service in the czar’s army.
Jay Neugeboren has published seven novels, a story collection, and a memoir. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and have been reprinted in more than fifty anthologies. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
