The absence of the letter itself is eloquent-as if its contents are too awful for anyone to take in.īorn Iosif Solomonovich Grossman into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not receive a traditional Jewish education. Grossman describes the difficulty Viktor experiences in reading it and his inability to talk about it even to his family. We learn who carries it across the front lines, who passes it on to whom, and how it eventually reaches Viktor. The words of this letter do not appear in Stalingrad, yet the letter’s presence makes itself powerfully felt and it is mentioned many times. One of the most memorable chapters of Life and Fate is the last letter written from a Jewish ghetto by Viktor Shtrum’s mother-a powerful lament for East European Jewry. The first novel is in no way inferior to Life and Fate the chapters about the Shaposhnikov family are both tender and witty, and the battle scenes are vivid and moving. The characters in both novels are largely the same and so is the story line Life and Fate picks up where Stalingrad ends, in late September 1942. Grossman wanted to call this earlier work Stalingrad-as it will be in this first English translation-but it was published as For a Just Cause. However, Life and Fate is only the second half of a two-part work, the first half of which was published in 1952. Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate has been hailed as a twentieth-century War and Peace.
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