Yekaterina Savelievna’s death, Grossman’s guilt, and the ensuing recriminations between him and his wife are all reflected in Life and Fate. Grossman evidently felt that his mother remained alive in his novel, and this sense of his mother’s continued presence seems to have led him to look on Life and Fate almost as a living being. His letter to Khrushchev in 1961 ends, “There is no sense or truth in my present position, in my apparent freedom, while the book to which I have given my life is in prison. For I have written it, and I have not renounced it and am not renouncing it. Twelve years have passed since I began work on this book. I still believe that I have written the truth, and that I wrote this truth out of love and pity for people, out of faith in people. I ask for freedom for my book.” There is perhaps no more powerful lament for Eastern European Jewry than the chapter from Life and Fate now often referred to as “The Last Letter”—the letter that Anna Semyonovna, a fictional portrait of Grossman’s mother, writes to her son and manages to have smuggled out of the ghetto.
