Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…It wasn’t written in Yiddish, but there’s a certain . . . I’ll say it a different way to take it a little more seriously. There’s a certain fatalism in Jewish fate, a feeling that we are endlessly the punching bags of the rest of the world, and that is our fate. Obviously, we’re living in a moment where the world’s a little different, with the current situation in Israel. But I think the characters in Life and Fate obviously do feel that they are beleaguered. There’s a certain Yiddish flavor to that that I can’t explain. Also, consider the Book of Job. Who can, himself or herself, actually defend what he or she has done in the eyes of God is another underlying theme in this book. Is it Victor in fact? Not entirely clear, even though he’s the center, mostly a sympathetic character. Who really is doing right under the eyes of God is highly unclear, I think, in Life and Fate. Oh, I agree, but we shouldn’t mislead readers. There’s very little God in this book. He doesn’t mention God a lot. God looms over the book to some extent, indirectly, implicitly, but what it means to be a human being and to live a life that is defensible, whether it’s to God or to your friends or to whomever, is a central part of this book. Grossman himself — again, no spoilers here, but look up Grossman’s entries in Wikipedia or articles that had been written about him. There’s a nice article in 2006 in The New Yorker by Keith Gessen. Grossman himself did some things he was deeply ashamed of. He was ashamed, I think, as far as we know, that he didn’t get his mother out of Berdychiv and that she’d perished there at the hands of the Nazis in 1941. He does sign some things publicly that benefit the regime that he, I think, regrets, and Victor goes through very similar throes of conscience.…

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