Daniel Stein, Interpreter

Ulitskaya builds Daniel Stein out of letters, interview transcripts, official memos, and the fragmentary recollections of dozens of people who knew him at different points in his life, with no single narrator ever stepping forward to settle how to read him. The character is drawn directly from the real Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who survived the war working undercover as an interpreter for the Gestapo in Belarus while secretly warning and smuggling Jews out of a ghetto, later converted to Catholicism, and became a Carmelite priest running a Hebrew-speaking congregation in Haifa.

Daniel's insistence, late in life, that direct ethical action matters more than institutional labels, Jewish, Catholic, Israeli, Polish, puts him at odds with both a Church hierarchy uneasy about his unconventional Hebrew liturgy and Israeli authorities unsettled by a convert who still claims Jewish belonging. Ulitskaya, a geneticist before she was a novelist, brings the same patient documentary instinct to Daniel that she brings elsewhere to Soviet dissidents and quiet moral holdouts, tracing how a single life lived across confessional lines exposes how much of institutional religion is really about policing boundaries rather than adjudicating conscience.

Ulitskaya includes her own voice among the documentary sources, breaking in periodically as herself, corresponding with a friend about the difficulty of the project, admitting where invention had to fill gaps the archival record left open. That authorial intrusion keeps the novel from pretending to a documentary objectivity it has already structurally disavowed, since a book built from other people's letters and memories is itself just one more partial account added to the pile, written by someone with her own stake in how Daniel gets remembered.

Rufeisen's real 1962 petition to Israel's Supreme Court, seeking automatic citizenship under the Law of Return as a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, became a landmark ruling, known ever since as the Brother Daniel case, that the state could recognize someone as ethnically Jewish while denying that a convert to another religion still qualified for immigration rights reserved for Jews by faith. Ulitskaya folds the case's actual legal reasoning into the novel's documentary material almost unchanged, letting a real courtroom argument about the boundaries of Jewish identity sit alongside her invented characters' letters as though both carried equal evidentiary weight.