HEAVY SAND (Tiazhelyi pesok)

Novel by Anatolii Rybakov, 1978

Heavy Sand (1981), originally published in Russian as Tiazhelyi pesok (1978), is a family chronicle that combines elements of a parable, a thriller, and a soap opera. It is loosely based on the true story of the life and death of the parents of Rybakov's friend Robert Kupchik. Rybakov and Kupchik first met before World War II in the central Russian city of Riazan', where Rybakov worked in a motor-transport depot and Kupchik was an economist in an industrial cooperative. Robert's grandfather, a Jew from the city of Simferopol' (in southern Russia), went to Switzerland to study for a degree in medicine, became a successful doctor in Zürich, married a German woman there, and in 1909 came back to Russia with his younger son, who was about to become a student, to visit relatives. When in Simferopol', the son fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a local shoemaker and married her. At first the newlyweds left for Zürich, but the shoemaker's daughter quickly understood that she would not adapt there and chose to return to Simferopol', together with her husband (Robert's father, who served as a prototype for Yakov Ivanovsky in Rybakov's novel). Because of his all-consuming love for his wife, he threw away his career as a student and began working as a cobbler for his father-inlaw. In the 1930s, during Stalin's purges, he was imprisoned on account of his suspicious foreign origins but released in 1940 as a half-German in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In 1942, however, both Robert's mother and father, together with other Simferopol' Jews, were killed by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave near the Crimean town of Sudak.

When at the preparatory stage Rybakov made a research trip to Simferopol', he discovered that the city failed to stimulate his imagination, as it could not resonate with his own childhood memories of Jewish life in the Russian South. For this reason he not only transferred the action to the Ukrainian town of Snovsk (in 1935 renamed Shchors, after a local Russian Civil War hero), where he spent some time as a little boy, but he also populated the Kupchiks' story with real-life members of his own family on his mother's side. Thus, Rybakov's maternal grandfather became the prototype for Heavy Sand 's patriarchal boot maker Abraham Rakhlenko, his great-uncle served as an inspiration for the character of the retired noncommissioned officer Khaim Yagudin, and certain features of both his mother and sister provided the basis for the image of the heroine, Rachel Rakhlenko-Ivanovsky. Even the narrator's voice with its distinctly Jewish intonation is modeled on Rybakov's aunt Ania (who recorded eight audiocassettes of her own reminiscences to help Rybakov with his book), although in Heavy Sand it actually belongs to a man, Rachel's son, Boris Ivanovsky.

Rybakov successfully used the first-person narration on behalf of a fictional character before, in his trilogy about Sergei Krasheninnikov (Prikliucheniia Krosha ["Krosh's Adventures"], Kanikuly Krosha ["Krosh's Holiday"], Neizvestnyi soldat ["The Unknown Soldier"], 1960-70), who is endowed with the authentic speech patterns of a 1960s Russian youth. Throughout the trilogy Krasheninnikov is growing up, as does Misha Poliakov, the hero of yet another Rybakov trilogy (Kortik [ The Dirk ], Bronzovaia ptitsa [ The Bronze Bird ], Vystrel ["The Shot"], 1948-75), with their views and attitudes changing accordingly. Rybakov's technique of showing characters in their development was skillfully applied in Heavy Sand, which follows the fortunes of a Jewish family over the time span of some 50 years. Both trilogies were either filmed or televised, often in several episodes per part, with Rybakov's working on the screen versions of his own books. This taught him the basic principles of broadcast drama, which he competently employed in Heavy Sand. The novel could be divided into rather self-sufficient units, with the reader's attention being focused on each family member in turn. Engaging domestic themes, such as complicated relations with neighbors and love affairs, are interspersed with work-related issues, which could easily become tedious but in fact never are. Thus, in the story of Yakov's arrest and trial for the alleged embezzlement at the shoe factory, the abundance of technical details even adds to the interest provided by the unexpected twists of the case. In such episodes Rybakov's expertise in the genre of production novel (see his Voditeli [1950; "The Drivers"], Ekaterina Voronina [1955], and Leto v Sosniakakh [1964; "Summer in Sosniaki"]) manifested itself to the full.

Chronologically Heavy Sand consists of three parts, consecutively describing Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia, in post-revolutionary Russia, and under the German invaders. This allows Rybakov to gradually build up the reader's empathy with the main characters to a degree when their execution, one by one, at the end of the book produces a truly devastating effect. Heavy Sand has been criticized for its linear structure and traditional plot—that is, too harmonious a form to reflect the genuine experience of the Holocaust. Such a criticism underestimates the fragmented nature of the narration, which now interrupts itself to make a digression or now runs ahead and prematurely discloses important components of the plot, instead of keeping the reader in suspense. This "homey" style, says M. Eidelman, "ultimately creates a disintegrative effect." On the other hand, Heavy Sand needed a fairly popular, widely accessible literary frame to get the message about the Holocaust across to as many people as possible. From this point of view even the novel's Soviet-style internationalism played a positive role by enabling those Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians whose relatives died because of the war to identify, at least partly, with the Nazi victims of Jewish origins. (It appears that Rybakov's choice of the fictional family name Ivanovsky, reminiscent of one of the most common Russian surnames, Ivanov, serves the same purpose.)

A close examination of Heavy Sand reveals that it is less Sovietized than people usually assume. Its imagery is based on three quotations from the Bible, strategically placed at the very beginning and at the very end of the novel. (Citing from the Bible in itself was a daring act in a country ruled by militant atheists.) The first explains the symbolism of heavy sand and hints that the author cannot speak freely (my grief and calamity "would be heavier than the sand of the sea: therefore my words are swallowed up," Job 6:3). The second (Genesis 29:20) reminds the reader of the biblical story of Rachel and Jakob, which has obvious parallels with Heavy Sand 's Rachel and Yakov. The slightly modified third (Joel 3.21) expresses Rybakov's attitude toward the Holocaust ("those who have spilled innocent blood shall never be forgiven") and toward the "Jewish question" as a whole (he meaningfully omitted the second half of the verse, "for the Lord dwelleth in Zion"). The novel's parabolic features become further reinforced when Rachel suddenly dissolves into thin air on her way to the partisans' camp, where she is leading the ghetto survivors after their rebellion. It is quite characteristic that the communist commander of the partisan detachment, who is not supposed to give credence to supernatural phenomena, seems to believe in Rachel's mysterious disappearance, although he prefers not to admit this openly. This scene graphically demonstrates that, contrary to what the communist ideology claims, certain things are simply beyond the communists' grasp. This is also con-firmed by the final episode, when the same partisan commander asks the narrator whether the Hebrew inscription on the bilingual memorial gravestone to the ghetto victims is a correct translation of the neighboring Russian sentence. Although the Hebrew phrase has nothing to do with the Russian original, the narrator gives the commander the af-firmative answer. This can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of Rybakov's discreet and successful attempt to fill the socialist-realist frame of Heavy Sand with powerful Jewish subtext.

The novel was translated into 39 languages and came out in 26 countries. The Heavy Sand files, including thousands of readers' letters, were donated by Rybakov to the University of Tel Aviv, which conferred on him an honorary Ph.D. degree.

—Andrei Rogachevskii