Full Description
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.
Contents
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
