Immigrant Worlds and Texts Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine

Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) worked as a detective and district attorney for 30 years in Soviet Ukraine and wrote his memoirs after immigrating to the US in 1993. Translated by Marat Grinberg, the memoirs tell the fascinating story of what it took for a Jew to survive in the halls of Soviet power. 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.