Life and Fate Introduction by Polly Jones (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

The second is, is Life and Fate.

The second is, is Life and Fate

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. A really stunning kind of human portrayal of the ramifications of the Holocaust and that entire era.

Welcome to the Rest Is History, and that was Vasily Grossman in his great novel Life and Fate, drawing on his experience as a war reporter during the Battle of Stalingrad in the last months of 1942.

Vasily Grossman had this terrific dictum in the middle of life and fate, where he says, tell me what you accuse the Jews of. I'll tell you what you're guilty of.

There's this rule, as you know, that I go into in the book that I've mulled on a lot that I got from the great Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, who appears intermittently throughout the book, and Vasily Grossman had this terrific dictum in the middle of Life and Fate, where he says, tell me what you accuse the Jews of. I'll tell you what you're guilty of.

Vasily Grossman's wonderful book, Life and Fate, there's a little chapter where this guy has written a little letter in the Gulag and he says something like, happiness with a capital H has been the cause of the greatest evil in the world.