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All Unhappy Families

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
November 30, 2011

If Vasily Grossman’s World War Two/Soviet/Holocaust epic Life and Fate seems Tolstoyan in scope and style (and title), that’s obviously no accident. But, lead critic Adam Kirsch argues today in Tablet Magazine, Grossman’s achievement was to co-opt the Russian novel as well as the fully Sovietized Jews who populate his story and focus the attention back on what, after all, the Nazis themselves were primarily concerned with: Jewishness.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.