Boris Fishman‘s “A Replacement Life” comes out in paperback this week. The debut novel was named one of the “100 Notable Books of 2014″ by The New York Times.

“A Replacement Life” centers around Slava, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union. Though Slava wants to forget his roots, his grandfather pulls him into a scheme of writing fraudulent petitions for Holocaust reparations.

As Fishman told Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson, he was inspired by a letter he wrote for his grandmother, a genuine Holocaust survivor, and by his own experiences immigrating from Belarus.

This segment originally aired in June 2014. Read an excerpt of “A Replacement Life” here.

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