Someday, like it or not, people are going to make jokes about the war in Iraq, the massacre in Rwanda, the Holocaust, and 9/11, the same way we already do about The Spanish Inquisition, the Fall of the Roman Empire, and the Crusades.

As time and distance intervene, it becomes harder and harder to imagine the human suffering of past conflicts or to understand that any of the victims on either side could have been us. Unless, of course, we hear their stories and make them part of our own.

Years ago, in the late ‘60s, when I translated Russian literature for a living, a Jewish author in flight from the USSR named Efraim Sevela brought me a manuscript full of grief. It was a collection of stories about the fate of the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe under the Nazis during WWII and of the thousands who survived them  under the Soviets. Anti-Semitism, Sevela wrote, had also survived and now hissed its hate with a Russian accent.

The collection was called The Road to Happiness and I translated it for Doubleday books. I found a copy of it the other day and, more than thirty years after I first read them, the stories still sound fresh to me. Here is an abridgment of one of them set in Lithuania fifteen years after the war. I call it “When Does the War End?”

Transcript coming