The stolen Jew

the long version

"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, guilt-ridden relationship with a deranged, now deceased brother, Nachman. Almost immediately Nathan instigates, and is caught up in, a web of outrageous games and liaisons within the not-so-warm bosom of his large, bourgeois family. Central to his schemes is The Stolen Jew, a famous novel he wrote many years back that tells a 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 tsar's army. Now, Nathan contrives to forge variant original drafts of that book for sale to Russian collectors, with the proceeds to help Soviet dissidents."--Publisher description.