The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

"This is the first and to date only such monumental biography of Grossman. John and Carol Garrard remain the best informed and most dedicated students of his life and work. It’s to them that both the academic field and the general readership owe much of what we know about Grossman in the West. The book was recently reissued, and the original title was The Bones of Berdichev . Berdichev was Grossman’s hometown in Ukraine, and the place where his mother was murdered along with about 20,000 other Jews in September 1941. If one were to suggest a single biography that you can read sweepingly in one sitting – it’s un-put-downable in many ways – this would be it. Absolutely. Known as the “Jerusalem of Volhynia,” Berdichev was a major centre of Jewish learning and publishing, and Grossman grew up there in a family of Jewish-Russian intelligentsia. His father was a chemical engineer, his mother a teacher of French. At home he was not exposed either to Yiddish or to Judaic traditions in a systematic way. By the standards of that time and place, he came from the crème de la crème of the acculturated Jewish-Russian intelligentsia. Grossman was born in 1905, so he came of age at the time of the Russian revolutions and the Civil War. A revolutionary-minded youth, Grossman eventually ended up studying at Moscow University, graduating in chemistry. This is a fairly standard path, which, incidentally, happened to all four of my grandparents – young Jewish people coming out of the former Pale of Settlement, flocking to large cities after the revolution and especially going into engineering or the sciences. He first began as a writer of fiction, debuting in the 1930s with short stories and then with novels which are quite formulaic – one about miners, one about a working class lad’s path to Bolshevism. What is, perhaps, unique about his early work is you already see the imperative to represent the Jewish condition, and to show Jewish life. Then soon after the Nazi invasion in 1941 Grossman volunteered and become a military reporter for the main newspaper of the Red Army, Red Star or Krasnaya Zvezda. He was dispatched to cover the disastrous early months of the war, contributed journalistic pieces and also wrote his first novel, The People Are Immortal , which still reads breathlessly – although very Soviet in many ways, it describes the break of a Red Army unit out of enemy encirclement. Grossman’s first moment of great fame and national acclaim is Stalingrad. He covers Stalingrad from the autumn of 1942 up to the final stages of the battle, when he is reassigned, and publishes 13 essays, “The Direction of Main Strike” among them, which become nationally famous, printed and reprinted."