Hero in His Time

All his life Yuri Maximovich Isakovsky, a minor Russian poet, editor of a journal of folk music, sometime English translator, has assiduously avoided power and politics--in fact, attention of any kind. How can it be, then, that the Soviet government has chosen him to attend a conference in the fabled land of bourgeois temptation itself, New York City? And not only that, but to do a piece of work for the KGB, to deliver a code message embedded in the text of a certain poem to be read in public along with his own . . . Cohen has achieved here a tour de force, bringing the idea of poetry to life in a messy little man, no hero at all, not even that much of a poet. . . . [The novel] is stately as well as funny, an authentically noble account of a celebrant. . . . It is the true article.--Geoffrey Wolff, New York Times Book Review Arthur Cohen catches fire. . . . A Hero in His Time represents for him a great imaginative leap, for we are shown the interior mental landscape of a middle-aged Russian-Jewish minor poet and . . . most astonishing is that we believe, without question, in this poet.--Doris Grumbach, Village Voice A tremendous achievement. . . . To have made this tremendous imaginative leap from the heart of American Jewishness to the heart of Russian Jewishness was a daring thing to do, and it has been accomplished with absolute conviction.--The Sunday Times (London) A rich compound of high seriousness and robust comedy.--Newsweek