Life and Fate Archives - David Rodeback's Bendable Light

A few years ago, I had some thoughts I wanted to test and refine about the fiction I’m writing. So I wrote them out. I didn’t share them beyond my critique group. Lately I returned to that writing and updated it into this essay. It’s partly an artist’s manifesto – that term seems too grand – and partly a look behind the curtain or under the hood. It is the back story of stories I have written, am writing, and live.

I’m posting it here in three parts. This is the first.

Am I?

Whatever you write, from fiction to commercial website copy – insert your content marketing joke here – someone has probably told you, “Write what you believe.” If not, allow me to be the first.

Write what you believe.

I don’t mean that we writers should focus all our time and energy on nonfiction which expounds and promotes our personal belief systems in political, religious, or philosophical terms. There’s a place for that. I do some of it. But today we’re talking about fiction.

I certainly don’t mean that our fiction should be tendentious and moralizing. Fiction is a well-traveled road to truth, but it loses traction when it slips from inviting us to think into telling us what to think, when the author keeps intruding to preach to us.

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Years ago, I tried my hand at a few book reviews. Here is one of them, because I think it still has merit, and because I need some content to test the function of this web site I’m building. This was previously published at an old site of mine, BookishThoughts.com.

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Hardback: 436 pages. Free Press, 1999. ISBN: 0684822954.

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) is among my favorite authors, and his best novel, Life and Fate, is my favorite twentieth century novel. (It is available in English translation, though it deserves a better translation than it has received to date.) Grossman’s reputation in Russia deservedly eclipses Solzhenitsyn’s and Pasternak’s, though his work is little known in the English-speaking world. Life and Fate is many things – an 800-page novel can afford to be – but, above all, it is as profound a statement on human freedom as I have ever read.

The Bones of Berdichev is a the first book-length biography of Grossman in English. The title refers to Berdichev, a city in Ukraine, where more than 18,000 Jews were slaughtered in three days in September 1941. One of them was Grossman’s mother. But this is not only a biography; it is also a history of the Holocaust, from a very personal viewpoint. As such, it is not light or enjoyable reading; it is dark, deeply moving, rewarding reading.

Grossman is nearly always in the foreground, but the Holocaust looms large, as it did for him, through his years as a renowned and gifted war correspondent, and through the official disgrace in which he lived his last years, as punishment for writing things the Soviet government did not want to be written.

As the Garrards note, “Grossman was in fact a man of deep contradictions, like the times in which he lived. His was a life full of moral, cultural and philosophical conflicts.” Such a life is interesting enough, but there is more. This is the life of “a human being who went through the fires of hell and emerged with his soul intact.” There is, therefore, much to admire, and much to learn.

In the Preface the Garrards demonstrate an unfortunate tendency to preach, but after that, this is as fine a scholarly biography as one might hope to encounter.

Tag: Life and Fate

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love

Am I?

Review: John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman