To the Editor:

Initially we chose to ignore Gary Saul Morson’s review of our book, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman [Books in Review, September 1996]. But Joshua Rubenstein’s letter defending his own biography of Ilya Ehrenburg, which was jointly reviewed by Mr. Morson, and Mr. Morson’s reply [Letters from Readers, January] have prompted this response.

Accused by Mr. Morson of whitewashing Ehrenburg’s various sins and ignoring evidence that did not suit his purpose, Rubenstein adopts an intriguing tactic. He takes Mr. Morson to task for missing an alleged fault in our book! Eager to set the record straight, he then spends two-thirds of his letter attacking The Bones of Berdichev.

In his reply to Rubenstein’s complaints, Mr. Morson confesses with disarming candor that a statement in his review about the issue that upsets Rubenstein (the role of Ilya Ehrenburg in the creation of The Black Book) “represents my paraphrase of the Garrards’ account, not my own view of the subject. Apart from the two books under review, I have no information worth mentioning. . . .”

Setting aside the fact that Mr. Morson failed to paraphrase our treatment of The Black Book fully and accurately, we are surely entitled to ask what value Mr. Morson’s view might have, since he has “no information worth mentioning” about it?

May we also correct his effort to lump our book together with Rubenstein’s as examples of the “compromises biographers make to justify the lives they narrate”? In his review, Mr. Morson does devote several paragraphs to the compromises in Rubenstein’s biography. But none of this has anything to do with our treatment of Vasily Grossman. Later in the review, indeed, Mr. Morson contradicts his earlier statement by calling The Bones of Berdichev “the story of a man who spends much of his life atoning for his disgraceful acts.” He cannot have it both ways. Either we are guilty of “compromises” or we have laid out “disgraceful acts.”

As any reader of our book can confirm, The Bones of Berdichev demonstrates that Grossman was quite different from Ehrenburg (a man whom we admire in many respects). Here again Mr. Morson fails to paraphrase accurately. Grossman’s faults were those of omission rather commission. He did not spend a lifetime cooperating with the Stalinist regime, but he was intimidated on moral issues that troubled him deeply. Part of his continuing interest as a writer derives from the ruthless honesty and artistic integrity with which he examined his own experiences, including his failure to act, in his novels and short stories.

We can agree to disagree with Mr. Morson on a number of issues since his opinions are (as he confesses) not based on a close familiarity with the facts set forth and analyzed in our book. However, we do take exception to his notion that we portray Jews, including victims of the Holocaust, in too favorable a light.

As non-Jews we view accusations of philo-Semitism from Gentiles as a kind of backhanded compliment—and our book has provoked several such “compliments.” It is harder to know what to make of accusations from a Jew without any professional background in the subject at hand who argues that we present too sympathetic a picture of Jewish suffering at the hands of czarist authorities and later of the Nazis and local collaborators during the Holocaust.

Mr. Morson dismisses as special pleading what are in fact documentary accounts of mistreatment and massacres, drawn from newly opened Soviet archives. He charges us with granting the victims a “morally privileged position.” This sentiment and the style in which it is expressed echo the bloodless world of modern literary theory, in which Mr. Morson seems so much at home.

Whatever Mr. Morson’s motives, we make no apologies for expressing sympathy for the innocent men, women, children, and babes-in-arms at Berdichev and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory who were humiliated, robbed, and butchered for no reason other than that they were Jewish.

As for Mr. Morson’s claim that we “apologize for anything and everything Jews have ever done,” this is an unconscionable statement and a malicious attempt to devalue our book and the terrible suffering it documents. The claim patently misrepresents our views and those of Grossman as set forth in The Bones of Berdichev. We tried only to stay faithful to Vasily Grossman’s published works and to his humanitarian spirit in urging the treatment of Jews as people—no more, no less.

John and Carol Garrard
University of Arizona
Tucson Arizona

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Gary Saul Morson writes:

John and Carol Garrard claim that in my review of their book I accused them of portraying Jews, “including victims of the Holocaust, in too favorable a light.” According to them, I wrote that in The Bones of Berdichev they “present too sympathetic a picture of Jewish suffering at the hands of czarist authorities and later of the Nazis.” In the same vein, they now assert that they “make no apologies for expressing sympathy for the innocent men, women, children, and babes-in-arms . . . who were humiliated, robbed, and butchered for no reason other than that they were Jewish.”

What prompts these egregious characterizations, which come close to accusing me of callousness toward Jewish suffering? Their comments refer to a single sentence in my review, which reads:

Unfortunately, too, [the Garrards] tend to suggest rather facilely that the suffering of Jews has given them a morally privileged position, and to apologize for anything and everything that Jews have ever done.

That is all.

Surely, to suggest that not all Jews are morally pure does not mean that they deserve the suffering that has been inflicted upon them. In writing that sentence, I had in mind a number of passages in the Garrards’ book that seem to me questionable in terms of both judgment and ethics. To take just one example: in their discussion of the Russian civil war, they mention a Jewish Red Army soldier who, in retribution for anti-Semitism, would bayonet Ukrainians en masse in a blind fury. Their comment: “naturally enough, on occasion Jewish Red Army officers sought revenge for the brutal murder of their own loved ones.” They might have spared us that “naturally enough.”

The Garrards find it a direct contradiction (“he cannot have it both ways”) to say that a biography can admit to disgraceful acts on the part of its subject and still be compromised by an overly apologetic treatment. But this is not necessarily a contradiction, since everything depends on how one presents those acts, and what story they fit into. There are, in fact, many biographies of political and literary figures that concede faults only to downplay their significance.

In my reply to Joshua Rubenstein, I wrote that, apart from what was presented in his and the Garrards’ book, “I have no information worth mentioning on the creation of The Black Book” about which the two studies disagree. For the Garrards, this admission shows that I lack the credentials to review their book: “His opinions are (as he confesses) not based on a close familiarity with the facts set forth and analyzed in our book.” Confesses? Because I do not know about the composition of The Black Book, I apparently do not know anything else about the subject. I would have thought, in any event, that adjudicating between two scholars’ accounts of an incident is a topic for another scholarly article, hardly the function of a review.

Finally, although I have published nine books and some 50 articles on Russian literature and thought, including on Russian anti-Semitism, I am described as “a Jew without any professional background in the subject at hand.”

The Garrards’ letter is filled with ad-hominem attacks, but perhaps the most telling comment occurs at the end; my review, they say, is “a malicious attempt to devalue our book and the terrible suffering it documents.” Here, the Garrards seem to be equating criticism of their book with lack of sympathy for the millions killed by the Nazis. I suppose it might be possible to imagine a more cynical use of the Holocaust, but it would be difficult.

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