Memorya[a\xACa[s Tailor

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.)