Designer Zhorka. Book One. Boys

A new adventurous, piercing story by the brilliant prose writer Dina Rubina. In the first book, the reader is taken on an exciting journey from pre-war Warsaw to Soviet Astrakhan, from wartime Bukhara to post-war Poland…

In the house of ten-year-old Itzik, the time is counted out in different voices for 387 hours. A unique collection began with the boy’s grandfather, and then was continued by his father—both were skilled watchmakers. Fleeing the Hitlerite invasion, the family ends up in evacuation in Asia. After the war, grown-up Itzik—now called Caesar—returns to his father’s home, but instead of the watch collection he finds only ruins. This loss will push him into a case that journalists will call “an elegant robbery.”

Decades later, the Designer Zhorка will step onto the scene—a master of hiding places and an expert in invisibility. He is also Georges, Georg, Jürgen, Shӧrs—depending on the country. But for now he is only the strange orphan boy Zhorка. Fate will bring him together with the elderly Caesar Adamovich, who now works as a mechanic-lab assistant in a leper colony. Fate will also bind them with the secret of one collection.

A tightly knotted web of strange circumstances—times, fates, and dramatic events—forces the reader to guess with bated breath: who stole an unimaginably expensive collection of watches from the Jerusalem Museum? Why will the “designer” Zhorка have to deal with the “robbery of the century”? And the most important question: what role did the mysterious Caesar Adamych and the painted-tattooed “Arlequin girl,” Lydia, play in all this?

Listen to a new story about love and loneliness, about a unique collection and the search for lost treasures—in the author’s delightful performance.

Attention! The phonogram contains profanity.