The Dissident
On his wedding day in Moscow in January 1976, Viktor Moroz realizes no one at the ceremony actually knows how to perform the Jewish rite. He rushes to seek the help of his friend Albert Schwartz, only to find him and another man, Alan Foxman, an American diplomat, hacked to death in Schwartz’s bed. Fearful about informing the authorities, Viktor scurries away. Yet he and his bride, Oksana Moskvina, nevertheless become deeply involved in efforts to discover the perpetrator—or someone who could be blamed for the murders.
The Dissident is Goldberg’s third novel. The Yid, set in 1953 Stalin’s Russia, was published in 2017, and The Chateau, set in 2017 Florida, followed in 2018. He has also written two nonfiction books about Soviet human rights.
Though freeform, with often abrupt shifts in presentation and context, The Dissident is laden with detail, as footnotes add subtext and define Russian terms and turns of phrase. Relying on trial transcripts, letters, diaries, and literature from Ludmilla Alexeev, exiled founder of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, Goldberg shapes stories from the past, capturing the voices of those who lived them.
The novel is by turns caustically funny and claustrophobically tense. Characters sometimes smart-ass their way through interactions with superiors and operatives; other times, they hold thoughts close to their vests as they hurry past imposing Russian historical monuments that mimic their own dark emotions. As readers encounter American tourists and reporters, KGB members, CIA handlers, and Jewish activists, they, like the characters they are reading about, wonder who is shading the truth and who can be trusted. This is an illuminating return to the Cold War with those who see and feel it.
