Who Is Mr. Poliakoff?
By Simon Majaro
SML Publications, £12

Two years ago, Simon Majaro published Jerusalem’s Doctor of the Poor, a memoir about his father, a Russian refugee doctor in Jerusalem. Now he has brought out his first novel, Who is Mr. Poliakoff?

This is a very different kind of book, a historical thriller that moves between the Soviet Union, Israel and London in the mid-20th century.

We first meet the two central characters, Mr Poliakoff and Samuel Rozoff, in an Italian restaurant in North London that bears an uncanny resemblance to Villa Bianca in Hampstead.

The tone is set on the first page. Poliakoff “is a mystery wrapped in a veil of silence and an impenetrable living riddle”. He goes to eat at the restaurant three times a week, week after week, and yet nobody knows anything about him, except his name.

“It is evident that he is hiding stories, events and experiences. But why the secrecy?” Rozoff, known to everyone as Schmulik, is intrigued by Poliakoff. “What is he hiding?” Schmulik keeps asking himself.”

We soon find out that Schmulik himself has had an extraordinary life. Born in 1941 in Vitebsk, in the former Soviet Union, he and his mother were the sole survivors of their family.

Towards the end of the war, his widowed mother starts an affair with a man called Yuri. It soon turns out that he is not what he seems.

One morning two armed NKVD agents come to arrest him but he has already moved on. Fifteen years later, Schmulik gets to know “a colourful and mysterious character”, Dov Heifetz. Like everyone else in the novel, he is Jewish, tall, handsome and, it turns out, very dangerous to know.

The novel, already dark, gets darker still, especially for young Schmulik, and he crosses paths again with the mysterious Yuri.

By the time we return to the Italian restaurant, we know much more about both the novel’s central characters, who they really are, and why they have reason to hate each other almost beyond reason.

A short novel, barely a hundred pages long, Who is Mr. Poliakoff? is packed full of history, from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the Gulag under Khruschev to secret agents in Israel. It is full of twists and turns.

Not for nothing is it dedicated to John le Carré, who once gave Majaro some interesting advice in a restaurant, when Majaro was thinking of writing a novel about the mysterious Mr Poliakoff, while sat eating a few tables away.