From Publishers Weekly
Completed shortly before his death in 1995, Rudner's soaring allegorical fantasy about a retired Russian Jewish tailor who embarks on a self-appointed mission across the Soviet Union during Gorbachev's perestroika to collect the oral testimony of Jews is mordantly funny and moving. Exuberant and heartbreaking, it is both a celebration of Jewish identity and an exorcism of suffering and evil. Alexandr Davidowich Berman, 69, a survivor of WWII combat and Nazi death camps, orphaned by Stalin's murder of his parents, remains nonreligious, an apostate, until one day he unearths a tiny scrolled manuscript, sewn into an old coat, which bears witness to czarist persecution of Jews in the early 1800s. Galvanized into action, and joined by irreverent, hard-drinking retired glassblower/ bugler/actor Simon Zorin, Berman undertakes a haphazard grand tour, tape recorder in hand. His random interviews with Jews serve as a springboard for Rudner's sorties into history--the Napoleonic Wars, the Nazi onslaught against Russia, the Soviet mass murder of 30,000 Polish officers in Katyn forest, the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, an ultranationalist demonstration by Pamyat hooligans. There are cameos by a dying Tolstoy, a paranoid Stalin and Cold War-era KGB chief Yuri Andropov. The duo's adventure is full of surreal touches, as when Berman, appointed to mend Lenin's decomposing trousers, tweaks the Bolshevik's waxy nose and inserts a letter inside his silk shirt. Rudner (a former Holocaust literature professor and author of the praised novel The Magic We Do Here) brings absurdist humor to his madcap expose of the Soviet "socialist paradise" as a house of cards, an arbitrary, irrational, totalitarian hell rife with deeply ingrained anti-Semitism. Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Alexandr Davidowich Berman is an old Soviet Jewish tailor of extraordinary skill. While repairing garments in a museum exhibit, he stumbles upon "the world's smallest Torah," hidden inside a frayed coat. Secreted within is the sad tale of a stolen Jewish child. Berman, transfixed by the notion that stories of lost Jews are disappearing from history's consciousness, becomes determined to collect and preserve more such tales. As he sews his way across the Soviet Union, eschewing payment in exchange for extraordinary stories of ordinary people who lived Russian/Soviet history from the czars to the Holocaust and after, it soon becomes clear that Berman's mission is on a collision course with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet government. Part Don Quixote, part fairy tale, this book puts the reader at the center of Berman's obsessed, tender-hearted world as he careens toward disaster. Rudner, author of the highly acclaimed The Magic We Do Here (LJ 5/15/88), was diagnosed with cancer in 1994 and died before he could see this book published. His final work is recommended for all libraries.ABeth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MICopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Alexandr Davidowich Berman once sewed costumes at the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. Now weary and in his twilight years, this Jewish tailor has the heart of a hero. And he is ever alert to anti-Semitism. When called out of retirement to repair tsarist clothing for a traveling exhibition, he makes a startling discovery. It sets him on an extensive trail throughout Russia and on a seemingly impossible crusade. In the lining of an old jacket he has discovered a tiny scroll ("the world's smallest Torah") written by a nameless Jew during the time of Nicholas I. Secretly sewn there by some other Jewish tailor, it tells of a lonely father's heartache over losing his son in the Tsar's army. After repairing and sabotaging the clothing on Lenin's corpse, Berman conceives a grand design that pivots on this story of immemorial grief. Vowing to sew similar scrolls of Jewish biography into historical costumes throughout the Soviet Union, he dragoons an elderly glassblower named Simon Moscovich Zorin to be his companion. Recreating a vivid and magical picture of Jewry over many turbulent centuries, they crisscross the Soviet Union together on a fantastic, comical sojourn. It culminates in Moscow on a fateful day in 1991.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Completed shortly before his death in 1995, Rudner's soaring allegorical fantasy about a retired Russian Jewish tailor who embarks on a self-appointed mission across the Soviet Union during Gorbachev's perestroika to collect the oral testimony of Jews is mordantly funny and moving. Exuberant and heartbreaking, it is both a celebration of Jewish identity and an exorcism of suffering and evil. Alexandr Davidowich Berman, 69, a survivor of WWII combat and Nazi death camps, orphaned by Stalin's murder of his parents, remains nonreligious, an apostate, until one day he unearths a tiny scrolled manuscript, sewn into an old coat, which bears witness to czarist persecution of Jews in the early 1800s. Galvanized into action, and joined by irreverent, hard-drinking retired glassblower/ bugler/actor Simon Zorin, Berman undertakes a haphazard grand tour, tape recorder in hand. His random interviews with Jews serve as a springboard for Rudner's sorties into history--the Napoleonic Wars, the Nazi onslaught against Russia, the Soviet mass murder of 30,000 Polish officers in Katyn forest, the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, an ultranationalist demonstration by Pamyat hooligans. There are cameos by a dying Tolstoy, a paranoid Stalin and Cold War-era KGB chief Yuri Andropov. The duo's adventure is full of surreal touches, as when Berman, appointed to mend Lenin's decomposing trousers, tweaks the Bolshevik's waxy nose and inserts a letter inside his silk shirt. Rudner (a former Holocaust literature professor and author of the praised novel The Magic We Do Here) brings absurdist humor to his madcap expose of the Soviet "socialist paradise" as a house of cards, an arbitrary, irrational, totalitarian hell rife with deeply ingrained anti-Semitism. (Sept.)

Library Journal