Roger Levine is an estate planning elder law attorney living with his wife Donna in Canton Massachusetts a suburb south of Boston His works include The Borscht Meister of Babi Yar a novel of love war the Holocaust new The Secret of the Century a novel of the Kennedy Assassination and In Search of the Golden Shiksa a Portnoy esque fantasy about what else shiksas. 
Interesting take on the telling of ukraines and Russian history Fiction The Borscht Meister of Babi Yar The Borscht Meister of Babi Yar The general story was ok but I could have done without the weird allusions to sex random rant about present day politics in the middle of what was obstensibly an historical fiction book and urging the reader to Google things My bad for blindly entering book giveaways I saw a soup in the title and clicked without thinking The Borscht Meister of Babi Yar
Two young lovers Yakov Levin and Katya Luvshenko living at the edge of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv witness the murder of 35000 Jews on September 29 1941 from the hidden love nest they had previously built there Borscht is a beet cabbage based soup loved throughout Eastern Europe 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 Katya his beautiful Ukrainian wife follows him every step of the way in a love story encompassing 85 years Yakov s 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 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 Enjoy The Borscht Meister of Babi Yar.