QUE EL BIEN OS ACOMPAÑE

Translated into Spanish for the first time, May Goodness Be With You is, along with Everything Flows, the last book Vasili Grossman wrote. If Everything Flows is his political testament, May Goodness Be With You is his personal testament. In late 1961, when he already considered Life and Fate lost to the KGB, and suffering from the cancer that would ultimately claim his life, Grossman received a commission to translate a novel from Armenian. He spent two months in the Caucasus, and there, in that land and among its people, he found something deeply familiar: Armenian suffering is akin to Jewish suffering. Osip Mandelstam had already defined Armenia as "the little sister of the Jewish land." Armenia is not only the place where Noah's Ark came to rest after the flood, but its destiny is also intertwined with that of the Jewish people. A history marked by planned persecution, genocide, and diaspora. This mutual recognition between the two peoples was, in Grossman's words, the most profound impression he had in Armenia. In this essay-meditation, we encounter the most personal Grossman we have ever read. The gaze he casts upon Armenia and its inhabitants is a gaze upon all lands and all peoples. Nothing that is human escapes a writer who knows he is close to death and decides to write with complete freedom about what truly moves and impassions him, far from the control of any censorship, for he knows he is unlikely to publish again. The result is a hymn to "all the beauty of the world," as the poet Seifert would say, the most intimate and illuminating book by Vasili Grossman.