The Borscht-Meister of Babi Yar: Excerpt

Two young lovers, Yakov Levin and Katya Luvshenko, living at the edge of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv, witness the murder of 35,000 Jews on September 29, 1941, from the underground love nest they had previously built there. Yakov, a cooking savant captured by the Germans, becomes the Borscht-Meister of Babi Yar on a journey that takes him to Berlin, the Gulags and finally as cook privy to Joseph Stalin’s inner circle.  His beautiful Ukrainian wife, Katya, follows him every step of the way in a love story encompassing 85 years. His highly skilled surgeon father, Dr. Mendel Levin, also captured by the Germans, is forced to travel with a group of Nazi killers called the Einzatzgruppen, as they march through the Ukraine murdering Jews in village after village.  Transferred to the horrors of Stalingrad and captured by the Red Army there, he accompanies them as they drive the Nazis back to Berlin.  His skills land him in Moscow after the war as a physician to the brutal Russian leaders.   One hundred years of horrifying and unbelievable events right up to Putin’s present-day invasion, are captured here in this spellbinding novel of love, war and the Holocaust.