Heavy Sand is one of Anatoly Rybakov’s most significant novels. Having with great difficulty overcome the obstacles of Soviet censorship, it not only became a major event in the literary life of the country, but was also immediately translated into all the major languages of the world. The novel tells of the life of a Jewish family in the 1910s–1940s in one of the multinational towns of Western Ukraine, of a vivid and all-conquering love carried through the decades, of the tragedy of the Holocaust and the courage of the Resistance. Narrated by the son of the main characters, one of the few survivors of this once huge family, the story becomes a true hymn to a people who endured inhuman suffering.