The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays [Paperback]

The Roadbrings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author ofLife and Fate,providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as “Mama,” based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father’s downfall. The girl grows up struggling with the discovery that the parents she cherishes in memory are part of a collective nightmare that everyone else wishes to forget.The Roadalso includes the complete text of Grossman’s harrowing report from Treblinka, one of the first anatomies of the workings of a death camp; “The Sistine Madonna,” a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life.


Meticulously edited and presented by Robert Chandler,The Roadallows us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.

Another superb translated work to appear [in 2010] wasThe Road, comprising Vasily Grossman's short stories and journalism. Although occasionally tainted by propaganda, his stories – particularly the later ones – are extraordinary, punctuated with small details that stop the eyes and drag them back to read certain phrases again. —The Guardian

Grossman's unsparing, literary account of the horrific ways Nazi Germany implemented its ethnic-cleansing program at Treblinka was one of the first reports of a death camp anywhere in Europe and eventually provided prosecutors at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal with crucial backgroulÃ*