Heavy Sand/Anatoli Rybakov/381 pp.

Heavy Sand is a novel about one Jewish family's experiences from the beginning of the 20th century through the events of World War II and the Holocaust. A Dr. Ivanovski, whose family had immigrated to Switzerland, returns to his birthplace, the Ukrainian town of Ivanovka; his son, who has accompanied him, falls in love with a local girl and eventually marries her. The novel is the story of their family amid the events of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and World War II.
I had to constantly remind myself that this was a work of fiction, and not a memoir of the author's own experiences. The book is written in the first person, and the events that take place are described so well that it feels as if the author had actually experienced them himself. Rybakov's life does mirror that of the narrator of the story in many ways - he grew up in the same region, worked in a factory as an engineer, and served in the Red Army during World War II. Like the family in Heavy Sand his family was also Jewish.
For a long time I've had an interest in the Holocaust experiences of Jews in various countries. While this account was fictional, I understand that Rybakov based it on interviews he made with survivors of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and that parts of it were based on events that occurred during the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.
In addition to events in World War II, the novel also provides a view into the lives of Soviet citizens in the beginning years of the Soviet Union, including collectivization of agriculture, the first 5-year plans, and the push for technological education. In one chapter, the narrator's father is accused of profiteering by stealing from the factory in which he works. His son, a mid-level Communist party official, is more concerned with how the accusation will affect his own career than he is with helping his father; the scene is a good portrayal of the paranoia so prevalent during the Stalinist era.
The work originally came out in serial form in Oktyabr magazine in 1978, and it is surprising that some of the material, which is at times uncomplimentary toward the Soviet establishment, made it past the censors. Rybakov's more well-known work, Children of the Arbat, which is harshly anti-Stalin, was suppressed by the government and was not published until 1987, although it had been written as early as 1966.