Paul Goldberg - The Yid

My Russian friends tend to be in their eighties.

Janusz Bardach, whose prison memoir— Man Is Wolf to Man —I had the honor to review in The New York Times , helped me a great deal as well. After my review appeared in the Times , Janusz and I became friends. Our conversations, which occurred more than daily for years, fuel this narrative. Another witness of that time, Inna Semyonovna Baser, told me what she knew about monstrous events that were brewing in 1953. As a young woman, she knew about the lists of Jews, and she knew about the cattle cars that were coming from outer reaches of the USSR. A gifted editor and a friend, Inna gave me excellent notes.

Jerome Groopman, a brilliant physician-writer, encouraged me to keep this manuscript alive, providing suggestions and helping design the medical component of Stalin’s demise. Dudley Hudspeth, a cardio-thoracic surgeon, helped me design the episodes involving acute trauma. The case report of Arkashka Kaplan’s surgery was penned by Dudley. Otis Brawley, Steven Hirschfeld, Michael Friedman, Derek Raghavan, Richard Liebeskind, Doron Junger, Svetlana Dolina, Tom Grubisich, Patricia Lochmuller, David Stephen, and Beth Lieberman read this manuscript in various stages and offered encouragement and advice.

I wrote the Yiddish sections of this book myself, and my friend Lee Goldberg helped me correct it, struggling on my behalf with the juicy expressions, including the word in the punch line. In translation of Akhmatova’s poetry, I defer to Judith Hemschemeyer. The translation of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov is by Antony Wood, from The Uncensored Boris Godunov by Chester Dunning (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

My literary agent, Josh Getzler, took me on as a novelist rather than a writer of nonfiction. Despite many failed rounds of submissions of my novels, Josh didn’t tell me to go away and delete his contact information from my computer. He persevered, believing that this project would ultimately result in a published novel. His talented junior colleague Danielle Burby helped me pace this narrative, pulling me out of many a proverbial snowdrift.

It’s a pleasure to work with James Meader, my editor at Picador. James is one of those rare editors who understand how novels are structured and — more important — why they are written. His notes enabled me to unlock the unrealized potential of the characters I thought I knew well. Isabella Alimonti cheerfully kept the project on track even as the rest of us stumbled in the fog of multitasking.

Finally, this novel belongs as much to Susan Coll, a fellow dark humorist, as it does to me. Soon after our first date, Susan looked over my storeroom of unpublished novels, zeroed in on The Yid , and told me how to make this story fly.

Paul Goldbergfirst heard a Moscow version of the myth about Jews using blood for religious rituals when he was ten, in 1969. By the time he immigrated to the United States in 1973, he had collected the Moscow stories that underpin The Yid . As a reporter, Goldberg has written two books about the Soviet human rights movement and has coauthored (with Otis Brawley) How We Do Harm , an exposé of the U.S. health care system. He is the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter , a publication focused on the business and politics of cancer. He lives in Washington, D.C. You can sign up for email updates here.