Alexandr Davidowich Berman has made his living sewing costumes for the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. Old， weary， and alert to anti-Semitism， he has retired. Although he has shut himself up in his tiny apartment， the curator of the Catherine Museum finds him and commissions him to repair tsarist clothing for a traveling exhibition. One day while mending a vintage coat， Berman discovers a scrolled manuscript sewn into the lining. It is a letter written by a nameless Jew who lived in the early 1800s under Nicholas I. "I am a man of no importance. I only want my son to come back." Inspired by this document-the world s smallest Torah-the tailor is seized by a mission. Before they are forgotten， he is determined to collect the life stories of Soviet Jews and secretly sew them into the historical clothing preserved in Russia s great museums， even into the suit worn by Lenin s corpse. With Simon Moscovich Zorin， a retired glassblower he dragoons as his driver and companion， this tailor of Jewish memory crosses Russia and the Ukraine on a fantastic， sometimes comical journey. The histories of these two old men and of Russian Jews they meet during the sojourn recreate a vivid picture of Jewry over many turbulent centuries. Berman s odyssey to preserve his people s long heritage culminates in Moscow in 1991 on the day the Soviet government collapses. Memory s Tailor is Lawrence Rudner s second novel. He writes here with irony and magic that have inspired comparisons with works by Singer， Kosinski， and Garc?a-M rquez. Combining comedy， tragedy， and a sense of magical realism， Rudner makes this human story shine as a heartfelt witness to an epic of love， suffering， and endurance. Before his death at age 48 in 1995， Rudner had been acclaimed as a writer of great promise. His first novel， The Magic We Do Here (1988) was praised highly by readers and critics. Memory s Tailor， which he had completed just before he died， is the full flowering of a powerful talent. Lawrence Rudner was a professor of journalism， world literature， Holocaust literature， and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Memory s Tailor was prepared for publication by novelist John Kessel， Rudner s colleague at North Carolina State University， and by Susan Ketchin， author of The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction (University Press of Mississippi)， and the first editor of the University Press of Mississippi s fiction series.