<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal>Coming from a thoroughly secular Soviet background, the Russian-British novelist Zinovy Zinik became aware for the first time of his “Jewishness” when he emigrated to Israel in the 1970s. In this stylistically innovative autobiographical tale<I> </I>Zinik describes how an <I>unheimliche</I> experience in Berlin—of seeing for real the house he dreamed about many years before in London–led him to investigate the chequered and enigmatic past of his Russian-born grandfather, who, while ostensibly practicing as a doctor in Lithuania, was building the Soviet empire from which Zinik tried to escape 50 years later.<br><BR>In the manner of the classic detective story, Zinik's meditation on “assumed identity” and “plagiarized past” culminates in the notion of recognition as a redeeming factor, suggesting that it is not only central to the twentieth-century Jewish experience or even the wider world of émigrés, exiles and migrants of all kinds, but to the human condition itself.</P> <p> </P>