What inspired me about this book of courage and humor in a war-mad world were the images; Vivid, surreal scenes bring a hackneyed theme to life and set this novel apart from the rest.

Half-Jewish Lev (well, his father is Jewish, so that doesn’t count, right?) and his Russian counterpart Kolya are released from a Russian jail in the besieged city of Leningrad during World War II to find scarce eggs for the Colonel, whose daughter is getting married and would like a cake in this city where cannibalism has taken over the most disadvantaged. Our daring duo go to the German-occupied side on their egg hunt and encounter a myriad of adventures, some hair-raising, some heartbreaking, as they find their treasure and return it to their colonel, who has forgotten all. about the incident in the meantime and he has become the beneficiary of a lot of smuggled goodies, much more eggs, for the wedding of his beloved daughter. So far the story, sounds like one of those old westerns, huh?

Now let’s move on to the images that stuck with me: a dead German floating above the starving city on his parachute, killed by the cold instead of bullets, the well-fed colonel’s daughter skating down the Neva while her city starves, the dying boy tending his lonely chicken while his grandfather’s frozen grove rests beside him, the human sausage factory for those who aspire to some “meat” during the siege, Kolya and Sonya having sex and talking loudly in the middle of a room full of starving refugees, dogs tied up with explosives and used as mines against advancing German tanks. These are just a sample.

The enthusiastic Kolya and the gangly Lev are stark contrasts despite their physical and psychological differences. Despite his sociability, we also discover that Kolya is attempting to write the Great Russian Novel in fragments during breaks in his search, furiously writing with a pencil on scraps of paper. Ruthless sniper Vika, a young woman who dresses as a man to hide from the Germans, provides the contented love interest Lev in ways that surprise even him. The burly Abendroth, the German Einsaztkommando (an elite group of assassins deadlier than the Waffen SS), is the epitome of an archvillain, drinking liquor, playing chess, seeing through our heroes’ disguises, and killing random people. .

Although the ending was predictable, some of the lines stuck with me long after I finished the book, etching the characters indelibly in my mind: Kolya, who stumbles upon a farm with four able-bodied Russian women kept as sex slaves for the invaders, recounts the episode as “my balls sounded like a pair of weights”, while Lev, seeing his lewdest friend happily making out with an old girlfriend, comments “the loneliest sound in the world is other people making love”.

And as for the author, who seems to have borrowed much of the story from his grandfather, he takes his grandfather’s advice when things don’t make sense and “makes up for it” for the reader, thus giving us a memorable read.