Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine

Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) fought in the Red Army during World War II, graduated from the Law faculty of the Kyiv State University, and worked as a detective and district attorney for more than 30 years in Soviet Ukraine. He immigrated to the US in 1993. Marat Grinberg is Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he also teaches in the Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies programs. A prolific author, among Grinberg’s books are “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011), Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016), and The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (2023). Grinberg’s essays have appeared in Tablet Magazine, Mosaic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Jewish Journal. He lectures widely on topics ranging from Shoah literature and film to Jewish-Russian poetry. Grinberg is currently working on a large study of Jewishness and the Holocaust in Russian, Ukrainian, and East European speculative fiction of the Soviet era. 

Introduction

Part One: Criminal Cases




The Krasyliv Years

1. A Jewish Hullabaloo 

2. Thou Shalt Not Kill

3. Meir and Khoma

4. Guilty without Guilt

5. On the Shores of the River Bug




The Kamyanets-Podilskyi Years

6. The Forbidden Zone

7. “Seven Forty”

8. A Mistaken Object

9. Twenty Years Later

10. A Defendant’s Oral Argument




Women

11. Valya-Valentina

12. Samara

13. Nadezhda Petrovna

14. Alla




Part Two: Other Memoirs




15. Serbiyanka 

16. Above the Abyss

17. One Day in the Life of a Detective




Notes