The Soviet Union’s Great World War II Novel—and the Great Novel of Soviet Jewry

Vasily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate was first published in the Soviet Union 30 years ago—24 years after its author’s death and 27 years after the KGB seized the manuscript for its subversive content. Fortunately, the book had been smuggled out of the country in the 1970s and made its way to Western audiences. Among the once-forbidden subjects of this sweeping tale of Stalinism and World War II are the Holocaust and Soviet anti-Semitism. As a journalist, Grossman had reported extensively on the first and as a Jew he had experienced the second, which claimed the lives of his mother and other family members. Jacob Howland revisits the book and its moral and philosophical message: