History Thieves

Zinovy Zinik

 

4.25 x 7 inches, 118 pp. February 2011

ISBN : 9781906497781

Rs  395.00 (HB)
$14.95 (HB)
£9.50 (HB)

Buy (HB)

Coming from a thoroughly secular Soviet background, the Russian-British novelist Zinovy Zinik became aware for the first time of his ‘Jewishness’ when he emigrated to Israel in the 1970s. In this stylistically innovative autobiographical tale, Zinik describes how an experience in Berlin—of seeing for real the house he dreamed about many years before in London–led him to investigate the chequered and enigmatic past of his Russian-born grandfather, who, while ostensibly practicing as a doctor in Lithuania, was building the Soviet empire from which Zinik tried to escape 50 years later.

 

In the manner of the classic detective story, Zinik’s meditation on ‘assumed identity’ and ‘plagiarized past’ culminates in the notion of recognition as a redeeming factor, suggesting that it is central not only to the twentieth-century Jewish experience or even the wider world of émigrés, exiles and migrants of all kinds but to the human condition itself. 

Zinovy Zinik

 

Manifestos of the 21st Century