The Shady Elders of Zion is a Minnesota ghost story. Ivan Kalinsky, the book's narrator, is the last surviving Bolshevik from the class of 1917. When Stalin started purging Jews from the Communist Party ranks in the 1930's, Kalinsky escaped to northern Minnesota, where he lived out a long life as a union organizer. Now dead, he's just about to happily ascend to heaven and reunite with his Bolshevik clan, when two pesky Hassidic ghosts, Singer and Himmelman, blackmail him into helping heal and redirect Joshua Bronstein. Bronstein is a damaged soul, and a candidate for the Lamed Vav, one of the thirty-six hidden righteous men from whom the Messiah will be chosen when God decides it's time. And it becomes Kalinsky's charge to lead stubborn Bronstein out of his wilderness.