Boris Fishman

Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Winner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York. Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has—as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn’t his grandson a “writer”? High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him—Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American—but he wants to be a lionized writer even more. Slava’s turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family. A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.

A Novel

A Replacement Life

When their adopted eight-year-old son Max suddenly turns feral, Maya Shulman convinces her husband, Alex, to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max's birth parents, which results in unexpected consequences and life-altering changes.

a novel

Don't let my baby do rodeo

The author of the critically admired, award-winning A Replacement Life turns to a different kind of story—an evocative, nuanced portrait of marriage and family, a woman reckoning with what she’s given up to make both work, and the universal question of how we reconcile who we are and whom the world wants us to be. Maya Shulman and Alex Rubin met in 1992, when she was a Ukrainian exchange student with “a devil in [her] head” about becoming a chef instead of a medical worker, and he the coddled son of Russian immigrants wanting to toe the water of a less predictable life. Twenty years later, Maya Rubin is a medical worker in suburban New Jersey, and Alex his father’s second in the family business. The great dislocation of their lives is their eight-year-old son Max—adopted from two teenagers in Montana despite Alex’s view that “adopted children are second-class.” At once a salvation and a mystery to his parents—with whom Max’s biological mother left the child with the cryptic exhortation “don’t let my baby do rodeo”—Max suddenly turns feral, consorting with wild animals, eating grass, and running away to sit face down in a river. Searching for answers, Maya convinces Alex to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max’s birth parents—the first drive west of New Jersey of their American lives. But it’s Maya who’s illuminated by the journey, her own erstwhile wildness summoned for a reckoning by the unsparing landscape, with seismic consequences for herself and her family. Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a novel about the mystery of inheritance and what exactly it means to belong.

Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

One of Booklist's Must Read Nonfiction picks of 2019 The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told, recipe-filled memoir. A family story, an immigrant story, a love story, and an epic meal, Savage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle. A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected. Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Boris’s grandfather’s Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate. Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.

Three Generations, Two Continents, and Dinner Table (A Memoir with Recipes)

Savage Feast

A gentle, imaginative introduction to the skills all creative writers need.

Level One: Five Finger Exercises

The Creative Writer

A gentle, imaginative introduction to the skills all creative writers need. Breaking down the elements that go into successful imaginative works, The Creative Writer leads aspiring writers through the skills needed to construct each. The assignments, designed to make students more aware of language and more confident in their own ingenuity, build on each other until beginning creative writers have successfully created their own stories, poems, and essays. • Simple but innovative exercises encourage young writers to strengthen their vocabulary and become aware of the patterns of sentences • Legends and folklore are used to teach point of view, characterization, plotting, and other vital skills • Classic poetry serves as a model for the student’s own original poems • Unlike most “how to write” books, The Creative Writer is designed to be used in a mentor/student relationship, with teaching, guidance, and evaluation tips provided for the mentor or teacher • Can be used as a complement to Writing With Skill or on its own

The Creative Writer, Level One: Five Finger Exercise (The Creative Writer)

This book is a lusty and raucous anthology of stories about bohemians, danger junkies, and thrillseekers reveling in the cultural, social, political and sexual renaissance that followed the fall of the iron curtain.

Stories from the Last Frontier

Wild East

The third volume of the four-book series that guides students into the creation of sophisticated short fiction and mature poetry. • Complements Peace Hill Press’s expository series Writing With Skill by providing the imaginative element that many students want. • Unlike most “how to write” books, these are designed to be used in a mentor/student relationship, with teaching, guidance, and evaluation tips provided for the mentor or teacher. • All exercises build towards the production of finished creative pieces • Sequential, logical, step-by-step instruction • The third level builds on the introductory volume, The Creative Writer: Five Finger Exercises, but can be started directly by older students. • Instruction in the five essentials of fiction: plot, characters, dialogue, point of view, and setting. Level Three leads students into the construction of more complex plots, evocative settings, and three-dimensional characters • Guidance in the essential art of poetry: sound, rhythm, word choice, and poem construction. Level Three draws students into even more sophisticated use of words and themes.

The Creative Writer, Level Three: Building Your Craft (The Creative Writer)

Building on the introductory volume, The Creative Writer: Five Finger Exercises, a latest entry in the four-part series guides writing students through the creation of sophisticated short fiction and mature poetry with coverage of topics ranging from plot and character creation to establishing setting and achieving evocative dialogue. Original.

Building Your Craft

A moving novel about adoption and identity ‘You're the mother. You will raise him as you see fit. But I want to ask you for one thing... Please don't let my baby do rodeo.' Eight-year-old Max has gone missing. Again. His behaviour is a mystery to Maya and Alex, his Russian immigrant parents who adopted him as a baby in America. He has started wandering away from home, talking to wild animals, eating grass, and refusing to sleep in a bed. Can they really raise this feral child? Their uneasy marriage has tamed Maya's free spirit - but when Max is found after his most recent disappearance, she insists that they all drive from New Jersey to the boy's native Montana, to reconnect with his biological family. Maybe it will help them understand his mother's cryptic message? Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a beautifully nuanced and poignant novel about adoption, married love, and what it means to truly belong. Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, the Guardian, and many other publications. His first novel, A Replacement Life, won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal. He lives in New York.

Boris Fishman

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