“A fitting conclusion to a well-researched and meticulously edited memoir translation.” — Kirkus Reviews

“You have to read this book… It’s not like anything you read before.” — Tablet Magazine

Set in Ukraine, Crimea, and Israel, this unique two-volume autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in Tsarist Russia and Israel during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy and became a shochet (kosher slaughterer) as a young man, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of his surroundings. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity. 

The memoir is brimming with information. Goldenshteyn’s adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities, epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, technology, modernity and secularization. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire and in the Land of Israel.

Volume two begins in 1873, when Goldenshteyn obtains his first position as a shochet in Slobodze, and it follows him to the Crimea, where he endures 34 years  of vicissitudes. In 1913, he fulfills a dream of immigrating to the Land of Israel, hoping to find tranquility in his old age. Instead, he is met with the turbulence of the First World War, as battles rage between the retreating Ottoman Turks and the advancing British forces.

Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally, The Shochet is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.

A Kirkus Best Indie Book of the Year & a Library Journal Best World Literature read, from Pulitzer Prize-winning AP Journalist and Director/Producer/Writer of the Academy Award-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol

“[A] book for our times—vivid enough to grab us and not let go.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A powerful psychological thriller about borderline situations in life, hopes and dreams. Written against the backdrop of the war, before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the story acquires an additional passionate and humanistic significance." — Andrey Kurkov, author of Grey Bees

“[T]his timely novel from a Ukrainian author excels at examining the connection between reality and dreams and exploring the effects of war on the human psyche.” — Library Journal

The Dreamtime is a fusion of documentary and military fiction inspired by the author’s experience as an award-winning war correspondent that offers a unique and gritty point of view on the horrors of war through four intertwining narratives. Parallel storylines from a guilt-ridden doctor trying to exorcise his demons by exposing himself to war; a young woman tending to her ailing father as the bombs fall around them in Russian-occupied Slovyansk; a mysterious sociopath playing a cat-and-mouse game; and a forensic expert solving a murder case while trying to save her marriage with a discharged soldier bring a raw intensity and a deeply personal connection to the effects of war. As the threads of their stories unfurl, through harrowing scenes of personal and collective trauma, an enigmatic pattern emerges.

Shifting from Ukraine's war-torn Donbas to southern Europe and southeast Asia, The Dreamtime ties together themes of existential conflict, the blurred line between reality and dreams, and how easily the boundary dissolves between waking life and nightmare. Originally published in Kyiv in 2020, The Dreamtime has been well received by critics around the world and praised for its realism in depicting war, for its creative literary depiction of how dreams reflect the psyche, and for its masterly prose.