History Thieves

the long version

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 unheimliche 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 practising 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, Ainik's meditation on "assumeed 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 emigres, exile and migrants of all kinds, but to the human condition itself." -- Inside front cover.