Review of Topol's The Jewish Lover

The Jewish Lover is a novel by the popular Russian novelist Edward Topol. It is the story of one Iosef Rubinchik and the events that led to his leaving the Soviet Union. The story takes place in the late 1970's when the Cold War was at its zenith and some of the biggest exports of the soviet union was news about the refusniks, the dissidents like Anatoly Scharansky and others. Rubinchik is a Journalist who has a habit of seducing young Russian virgins and having them fall in love with him. Eventually this gets him in to trouble and leads to the complicated tale of sex, blackmail, and emigration.

I wont give away the plot here, but there is a lot that one can learn about the plight of the soviet Jews in that era. It is a tale that is not well known by the west, but one that every Russian immigrant must be familiar with. Treatment of soviet Jews of that period, suppression of religion, persecution, state-sponsored pogroms, and the constant threat of the KGB occupy the entire subtext of the novel, and resemble very much the stories we heard from Jews who did manage to get out, back in the 1980s, before the Berlin Wall fell.

Growing up, I remember a guy from the synagogue I prayed in who made a few trips to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The stories he brought back were similar to the ones Topol tells in this novel.

At bottom it is a popular trashy novel, but with lots of interesting stuff in it that makes it a worthwhile read anyway. It is marred by a few really annoying things that sometimes made the suspension of disbelief a bit hard. There was a line of Yiddish mistranslated here, and Hebrew word screwed up there, there were Jewish blessings screwed up, and there was someone insisting that Iosef put on tefilin on the Sabbath, something no Jew would do. In addition there was a rather anachronistic mention of Silicon Valley which was not the high tech capitol it is now in the 1978. The book is translated from Russian and the translator did a descent job, I suppose, of conveying the story Topol penned.