Excerpt from A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"All by herself, she was taken." His mother blew her nose. The receiver jostled on her end. "So," she said with sudden savagery. "Now will you come, Slava?"

"Of course," he said.

"Now he will come," she said viciously. Slava's mother held the world record for fastest trip from tender to brutal, but this tone had not entered even their arguments about his abandonment of the family. "Now is finally a good enough reason? The woman who would have skinned herself for you. The woman you saw—one time, Slava, in the last year?" She changed her voice to emphasize her indifference to his opinion: "We're doing the funeral today. They say it has to be twenty-four hours."

"Who says?" he said.

"I don't know, Slava. Don't ask me these things."

"We're not religious," he said. "Are you going to bury her in a shroud, too, or whatever they do? Oh, it doesn't matter."

"If you come, maybe you can have a say," she said.

"I'm coming," he said quietly.

"Help your grandfather," she said. "He's got a new home attendant. Berta. From Ukraine."

"Okay," he said, wanting to sound helpful. His lips twitched. His grandmother wasn't. This possibility he hadn't rehearsed. Why not—she had been ill for years. But he had been certain that she would pull through. She had pulled through far worse, pulled through the unimaginable, what was a bit more?

His grandmother was not a semi-annual hair-tousler. (Had not been? The new tense, a hostile ambassador, submitted its credentials.) She had raised him. Had gone into the meadow with him, punting a soccer ball until other children showed up. It was she who found him making out with Lusty Lena in the mulberry bush and she who hauled him home. (Grandfather would have rubbed his hands and given instruction, Lou Duva to Slava's Holyfield, half-nelsoned in Lena's formidable bust, but not for Grandmother loucheness.) When the nuclear reactor blew up, Grandmother cursed Grandfather for bothering with the radio, traded one of her minks (in fairness, acquired by Grandfather on the black market) for a neighbor's Zhiguli, and had Slava's father drive them all for a week to Lithuania, where the mink housed and fed them.

Slava knew her in the body. His mouth knew, from the food she shoveled there. His eyes knew, from the bloated sweep of her fingers. Grandmother had been in the Holocaust—in the Holocaust? As in the army, the circus? The grammar seemed wrong. At the Holocaust? Of it, with it, from it, until it? The English preposition, stunned by the assignment, came up short—though she said no more than that, and no one disturbed her on the subject. This Slava couldn't fathom, even at ten years old. Already by then he had been visited by the American understanding that to know was better than not to know. She would go one day, and then no one would know. However, he didn't dare ask. He imagined. Barking dogs, coils of barbed wire, an always gray sky.

"Goodbye, Slava," his mother interrupted. She spoke as if she hardly knew him. The line made its noises between them. He had the sensation that only they were speaking while eight million slept. The unreality of it teased him. Heartlessly: Grandmother was gone. Grandmother wasn't.

How long were they silent? Even while talking, they were silent with each other. Finally, in a faraway tone, his mother said: "Our first American death."

From A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman Copyright © 2014 by Boris Fishman. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.