She married an Italian Jew, of whom little is known, and whom she left for Semyon Osipovich Grossman, a Jewish Ukrainian chemical engineer who had graduated from the University of Bern. In spite of this disability, she was clearly an unusually independent woman for her time. Yekaterina was born with a misaligned hip joint. All four sisters were fluent in both Russian and French. She certainly had some knowledge of Yiddish, but whether or not she spoke it freely is uncertain. Like her three sisters – Maria, Anna and Yelizaveta – she was always called by an adopted Christian name rather than the Jewish name she was given at birth. Her family seems to have been thoroughly assimilated. She was one of 30,000 Jews shot by the Nazis outside Berdichev in September 1941.īorn in 1871 to a Jewish family, Yekaterina was brought up in Odessa, then a wealthy and cultured city where Jews constituted nearly 40% of the population. And after his death, an envelope was found among his papers in it were two deeply painful letters he had written to his mother on 15 September 1950 and 15 September 1961, that is, on the ninth and twentieth anniversaries of her death. The most remarkable of his short stories (included in The Road) is titled simply ‘Mama’. He dedicated his most well-known work Life and Fate to her. Vasily Grossman’s relationship with his mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, was of central importance to him throughout his life.
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