The Achievement of Vasily Grossman

I have a friend, G, whose father, like Vasily Grossman, was a Jew in the Soviet army. An embedded journalist, just like VG.

Stalin only employed Jews in these forward positions because however bad it was on the Soviet side, it was worse in the Nazi camp, so no chance of defection. Then there was the added bonus of knowing Yiddish, i.e., a language closer to German than Russian.

G's father started the first German language newspaper in the Soviet zone. G's mother was his first employee. They fell in love, got married, had G and then a couple of years later, as Stalin became ever more anti-Semitic, G's father was purged. This was in 1950, before the Doctor's Plot. G was two years old.

Purged but not killed. I believe exiled to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) or some other place in Siberia. Which is where he lived out the rest of his life. G didn't see his father until 1977.

Such was life in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.