City of Thieves is a
tour de force: terrible, yet edifying, to read about ordinary people caught up in one of history's greatest dramas of suffering--the World War II Siege of Leningrad. In English, the best factual story of the siege is Harrison E. Salisbury's voluminous and definitive The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad . And although personal memoirs and fictionalizations of the siege abound, this "factional combination" of these by David Benioff, based on a story related to him by his grandfather, is the best. Acknowledging his debt to Salisbury for the historical facts, Benioff has composed a fictionalized personal relation (I'm reminded in some ways of Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird ) that will make you muse, sweat, laugh, and cry...but never sleep. You can't put it down. Seventeen-year-old Lev Beniov, son of an NKVD-arrested poet, is himself arrested for looting the frozen body of a fallen German paratrooper and put into "the Crosses," a notorious St. Petersburg (Leningrad) prison. There he meets the adept and charismatic soldier Kolya, who has been arrested as a deserter. Both fear execution, but instead they are given the task of obtaining a dozen eggs for a powerful military officer who wants to be able to provide a cake for his daughter's wedding at a time when the entire population of the city is starving and cannibals are a real danger. For a week Lev follows Kolya through a series of mishaps and perils...all based on real events...that keep the reader gasping along with the heroes as they flee, fight, are captured, meet others of similar plight, and commit themselves to selfless sacrifice in the interests of seeing the Nazi invaders vanquished.
No aspect of Lev's coming of age is omitted. Sex and scatology enter the mix of bizarre narrative elements, involving mostly the precarious balance of life and death in such a context of human deprivation and extreme violence. Lev and Kolya find themselves behind the German lines during the fierce winter where they meet a young girl named Vika who is a deadly sniper with a group of Russian partisans. Hearing of the atrocities of the German
einsatzkommando Abendroth, they plot together even as guarded captives to kill him. Human character emerges in sharp relief in times of such peril. Benioff shows us both the disgusting and the inspirational in this moving work. In my 40-year career as a Professor of Russian, I've met Harrison Salisbury and spoken with him about the siege. I have talked to many of those who experienced it in diverse ways and listened to them try to tell the tale in their diverse ways. I've read their memoirs in both Russian and in English. But I've never read it done better than this. The City of Thieves really takes you there.