little boy named David in a cramped cattle truck on

The result is a Bruegelian landscape divulging the grand sweep of history alongside the granular detail within. In Life and Fate, we see not just the broom but all the human dust that's shunted along with it. Perhaps Grossman was aiming for something like War and Peace but, because of his time on the frontline, crash-landed halfway between Tolstoy's era-defining epic and Chekhov's timeless, microcosmic short stories. One such episode follows a young unmarried woman called Sofya as she encounters an unaccompanied little boy named David in a cramped cattle truck on its way to Auschwitz.