Overview

The Shady Elders of Zion is a Minnesota ghost story. Ivan Kalinsky, the book's narrator, is the last surviving Bolshevik from the class of 1917. When Stalin started purging Jews from the Communist Party ranks in the 1930's, Kalinsky escaped to northern Minnesota, where he lived out a long life as a union organizer. Now dead, he's just about to happily ascend to heaven and reunite with his Bolshevik clan, when two pesky Hassidic ghosts, Singer and Himmelman, blackmail him into helping heal and redirect Joshua Bronstein. Bronstein is a damaged soul, and a candidate for the Lamed Vav, one of the thirty-six hidden righteous men from whom the Messiah will be chosen when God decides it's time. And it becomes Kalinsky's charge to lead stubborn Bronstein out of his wilderness.

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9781960250162

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Reviews

As a paranormal investigator, psychic and resident of Minnesota, the themes addressed in The Shady Elders of Zion are familiar to me, from bone-chilling winters, Ojibwa burial mounds, small town mentality, witches, seances, shades, and alcohol abuse. Gilbert's unerringly accurate depiction of the afterlife leads me to believe that he has channeled the very ghosts he writes about. He displays a down-to-earth and humorous touch when dealing with controversial issues of religion, politics, the class struggle, and whether it is morally corrupt to stare at a woman's chest unnoticed when you are dead. With classic Jewish irony, satire, and graveyard humor, Gilbert delivers the illegitimate child conceived by the union of the Coen Brothers and Twin Peaks, with the ghost of Sinclair Lewis overseeing the whole proceedings to document the gossip. -Adrian Lee, Paranormal Investigator and author of How to Be a Christian Psychic. I never thought the realm of the dead could be so funny. I found Jews there; I should have known there'd be laughter. -Ian Graham Leask, radio host and author of The Wounded and other stories about sons and fathers and House of Large Sizes.

I never thought the realm of the dead could be so funny. I found Jews there; I should have known there'd be laughter. - Ian Graham Leask, radio host and author of The Wounded and other stories about sons and fathers and House of Large Sizes.

Author Information

Bob Gilbert was raised in Jackson Township, New Jersey. He attended American University and after several years in the nation's capital moved to Minneapolis where he worked as a reporter and a waiter while raising a family. He returned to Washington DC in 2011, where he writes and waits tables at upscale restaurants, eavesdropping on ripe political discourse. His dining room experiences inspired his first novel Mintwood Place.

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