City of Thieves

Review: Eggs. Why did it have to be eggs? In a Russian city under siege by German forces, food runs scarce and eggs seem to be the scarcest of all. A Russian commander plans a birthday celebration for his beautiful, ice-skating daughter, and amidst the chaos of the war, he wants the very best for his sweetest little lady. What birthday would be complete without a cake, and what cake would be complete without eggs. He finds two men, Lev and Kolya, to steal these eggs and gives them one week to do so.

Cost of eggs in Leningrad during WWII: your life.

Lev is a teenage Russian Jew who in what could be his final act of rebellious youthfulness chooses to stay behind in besieged Leningrad to show his mother he is a man. Lev spends the war nights helping his city lookout for German bombers on the roof of his apartment building. One night a frozen German pilot parachutes into his neighbor hood, and Lev is caught on the streets after curfew pilfering the body. Thrown in jail, he finds that his cell mate is everything he is not. Tall, incredibly handsome, college-educated and confident, his cell mate Kolya has been accused of deserting his unit. Kolya claims his rendezvous with a woman kept him from making it back to his unit on time. Instead of death, they are given one last chance at redemption. The Russian commander gives them one week to find eggs.

Finding the eggs in a city with a starving populace is surely impossible, and their search increasingly puts their lives in danger. Death will find them, Lev doesn’t doubt it, but they are not sure if it will come from their fellow war-torn citizens, the Russian Commander or the Germans themselves.

Recommendation: The character of Lev is classic. Small for his age, shy, ignorant, and cowardly, he refused to flee with his mother and sister in an effort to prove his independence and manliness. Like many teenagers on the verge of adulthood, he acts recklessly and without much thought for the long run. Unable to be join the army because (despite his choice to stay behind) he is not yet 18, he volunteers on the rooftops and reminisces about his deceased father, a victim of Russian politics. He has everything to gain and everything to lose, and his journey will finally test him the way he has imagined.

Paired with the impossibly perfect Kolya, our little Jewish friend begins to learn life’s lessons from the Russian Casanova, and their uneasy truce slowly blossoms into a friendship. Kolya slips effortlessly from discussions about great literature to the ins and outs of seducing women properly. When his mind is not amongst the great novelists of his time, it is definitely in the gutter. The author does a great job of portraying his main character in a light consistent with teenage selfishness and awkwardness. Lev, as self-concious as any unproven teen, cannot help but sulk at the unfair burdens placed on his shoulders. Not only does he have to get killed to find eggs or not find eggs to get killed, but he has to live with the shame of being a virgin in the presence of (apparently) god’s gift to women. The humor found in the interactions helps to balance the depressing situation Leningrad finds itself in. Capturing the banter of two such characters is tricky, but Beinof does a fairly good job. T

At the core of the book is exactly what one should expect from a story about youthful men. Lev struggles to define himself as the man he wants to be, and Kolya starts to come to grips with the person he has become. It is surprise to both of them and the reader that despite their myriad differences, they have much in common. Together they both must examine what makes them human, and it is their struggle with the atrocities around them as well as the rays of hope that help make this story engaging.

Ulitmately, I cannot say that I loved this book nor can I say that I despised it. The character of Lev was somewhat hard to like, despite being able to understand his impetuousness. With many protagonists you quickly come to support them, love them, or even loathe them. Lev never resounded inside me. His lack of courage and tendency to shirk from social situations could not compel me to root for him until midway through the novel when a love interest in introduced. This is surprising because I myself was socially awkward, somewhat introverted, and hardly a candidate for potential heroics at the same age. Lev should have been a character I found familiar and interesting. Instead, I found him somewhat unauthentic and cold. Only towards the end of the novel did I feel really engrossed in his story.

Beinoff, David, City of Thieves, Viking, 2008, New York.

Currently Reading: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

On Deck: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly