What was it like to work as a Jewish district attorney in provincial Soviet Ukraine in the post-Stalinist eras? What role did antisemitism and Holocaust memories play in solving and investigating the criminal cases? How does a detective’s mind work? The answers to these and many other fascinating questions are found in this book. Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) worked as a detective and district attorney for 30 years in Ukraine and wrote his memoirs after immigrating to the US in 1993. Translated by Marat Grinberg, a prolific scholar of Russian and Jewish literature and cinema, the memoirs tell the rich and poignant story of Goldis’s life and what it took for a Jew to navigate and survive in the halls of Soviet power.
Table of Content
Introduction
Part One: Criminal Cases
The Krasyliv Years
1. A Jewish Hullabaloo
2. Thou Shalt Not Kill
3. Meir and Khoma
4. Guilty without Guilt
5. On the Shores of the River Bug
The Kamyanets-Podilskyi Years
6. The Forbidden Zone
7. “Seven Forty”
8. A Mistaken Object
9. Twenty Years Later
10. A Defendant’s Oral Argument
Women
11. Valya-Valentina
12. Samara
13. Nadezhda Petrovna
14. Alla
Part Two: Other Memoirs
15. Serbiyanka
16. Above the Abyss
17. One Day in the Life of a Detective
Notes
About the author
Marat Grinberg is Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he also teaches in the Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies programs. A prolific author, among Grinberg’s books are “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011), Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016), and The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (2023). Grinberg’s essays have appeared in Tablet Magazine, Mosaic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Jewish Journal. He lectures widely on topics ranging from Shoah literature and film to Jewish-Russian poetry. Grinberg is currently working on a large study of Jewishness and the Holocaust in Russian, Ukrainian, and East European speculative fiction of the Soviet era. He resides in Beaverton, Oregon.
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