Moscow Book of Promises

"MOSCOW BOOK OF PROMISES" is a satirical, bittersweet account of the misadventures of a Jewish American businessman chasing the shadows of commercial success in the Moscow of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) during the late 1980s, in the dying days of the Soviet empire. Joshua Edelshtein is the prodigal yuppie son of a conservative Jewish emigre screenwriter in Hollywood who has just paid handsomely for Joshua's legal fees so that his son could gain custody of his only daughter. No sooner has Joshua won custody than he gives it up to accept his hi-tech company's offer to open up the personal computer market in the twilight days of the USSR. His father, who fights passively for Soviet Refuseniks, feels doubly betrayed. In his frustration, he demands that Joshua compensate him by sending home letters which the father might use in his script treatments.Armed to the teeth with American PC technology and a bizarre grasp of modern capitalism, Joshua sets sail from Silicon Valley for Moscow and the land of his Jewish forefathers. Moscow will never be the same."MOSCOW BOOK OF PROMISES" is an epistolary story composed of Joshua's "Dear Dad" letters home. The letters are double-edged: one side exposes the objective world of clashing cultures, the marriage of Soviet illusions with American naivete; the offspring is often the sham of "joint venture by press release". At the same time, we witness Joshua's ambivalent feelings for his father and his search for roots and relatives (a search his father fears). Joshua's adventure becomes a tragicomedy of contretemps, intrigues, betrayals, friendships, fears and hostilities, which color the murky landscape of business life in Moscow, one of the great cities of the world submerged in the confusion of revolutionary changes. It is a tale full of promises of love and hope, told to a cynical father and signifying America's newborn romance with Russia and her aspirations for commercial conquest in the "evil empire" gone awry.Joshua's business activities are only temporarily interrupted when he is asked to run for the leadership of the newly formed "Soviet Consumer Party" and subsequently fired by Globaltek, his employer. At this point, his life becomes dominated by his mentor, Dick Raven, an American economist whose purpose in Moscow is unclear and whose counsels and motives may appear egotistical and treacherous to the eyes of the reader, but not to our trusting hero. Through his misguided efforts, Joshua achieves a dubious celebrity that leads him to an affair with a woman who may be something more than the journalist with whom he is infatuated. Fate's final thrust comes from Pamyat, the ultra-nationalistic and anti-Semitic Russian society.Joshua's false confidence in his business acumen, his naive hopes of selling hi-tech for dollars in an abacus-run, nonconvertible ruble economy, his political ambitions to transfer American commercial ideology onto sacred Russian soil, his artless affection for colleagues, adversaries, and nagging relatives, all combine to create the texture of a character and story reminiscent of a literary soup spiced with Don Quixote, Candide, and Sholom Aleichem.