The Road brings together short stories, journalism, essays, and
letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of Life 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 Road
also 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 Road allows
us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature
discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.