Book Banning: Why I Repaired a Torn Soviet Novel to Resist Trump

I vote, I’ve been to rallies, I’ve been to protests. But I want to resist Trump as an individual, in my everyday life, instead of just as a part of a group. I recently learned how to do that by repairing a destroyed copy of an old novel.

On the morning of April 14th, I was walking to campus. I passed a man who was strolling along and tearing pages out of a book. I watched in horror. There were loose pieces of paper all over the sidewalk. I picked one up and scanned it.

For a moment, I considered moving on. I had other things to do. Places to be. But something about the sight of a destroyed book kept me from leaving.

Saving Everything Flows

I learned later that the book was Everything Flows, by Vasily Grossman. I’d never heard of it. But I felt an intense need to pick its pages up off the sidewalk, even though I had no idea what to do with them. So that’s how I spent my morning.

Another student, Alex, was doing the same. When I asked, he handed me a bundle of pages that he was planning to recycle.

After a couple minutes of page-hunting, I ended up with 124 pieces of paper. The man willingly gave Alex what remained of the cover, and Alex gave it to me. Pages 1 to 43 were still in the book. I had pages 44 to 290 loose in my hands.

I had saved Everything Flows from a slow sidewalk death. But it took some time to understand the intensity of my reaction.

When I saw that man destroying that book, he immediately became a symbol of book-banning to me. More than that. He became a symbol of everything that was wrong with the treatment of books.

I had to pick up those loose pages. I had to take them home. And I had to do something with them.

The Disregard of Books

I love books. I love writing them, and I love reading them. That was one of the reasons that I collected the torn pages of Everything Flows. But only one.

I’m Jewish on my father’s side, and proud to be. Watching the random, indifferent destruction of Everything Flows reminded me of what I’d learned about the burning of books that marked the beginning of the Holocaust.

This man was obviously not a Nazi. And I’m only half-Jewish. But it didn’t matter: I had to save the book he had tried to destroy. That need became intensified when I learned about Everything Flows itself.

Everything Flows is Grossman’s final novel. It follows Ivan Grigoryevic after his release from the Gulag. After thirty years of imprisonment, he returns to Moscow and rejoins a Soviet Union slightly thawed by the death of Stalin.

The book presents the moral corruption of individuals under Soviet totalitarianism. Grossman wrote it in the early sixties. But it wasn’t allowed to be published until 1989, twenty years after his death.

Stalin’s KGB also confiscated Grossman’s first novel, Life and Fate. He was told that it wouldn’t be read by anybody for at least two hundred years.

Earlier in his career, Grossman was a journalist. He was one of the first to report the horrors of the concentration camps after their liberation. He was Ukranian-Jewish, like me. The Nazi army murdered his mother in the massacre of Berdychiv.

I had this man’s novel—destroyed, pages torn and stepped on—sitting in my room. It was safe now. But it certainly wasn’t readable.

All that I had learned about Grossman, about Stalin’s oppressive rule, about the Holocaust, about the disregard of books throughout history, mixed together. I decided that I had to repair the book.

Books Have a Right to Exist

I bought tape, borrowed a pair of scissors from a friend, and cleared my desk. After sorting through the loose papers, I found that I wasn’t missing any pages, though many were ripped.

I matched the torn pieces with each other by lining them up and seeing if their words connected. It was like solving a puzzle. Once I found where each scrap belonged, I taped them back together. It took a lot of time. The pieces had to be exactly in line with each other, otherwise the page would be illegible.

Some pieces were still stuck in the spine of the book. I very carefully removed them and taped them back to their pages, too. Then, I cut out what remained of the spine so that I could put the loose, refurbished pages back between the covers.

As I repaired the book, I thought about Stalin and Grossman and the Holocaust. It reminded me of the state of the world today—specifically, of Donald Trump. As a Jew and as an American, it makes me very uneasy that Trump is my president.

In 2015, before Trump entered the political scene, the American Library Association reported that 233 books had been banned or censored in schools and public libraries. In 2024, that number was 5,813. Under his new administration, even more books will be banned.

Every book has the right to exist, even horrible books like Hitler’s Mein Kumpf. And that right needs to be defended by those in power. Trump is the figurehead of anti-wokeness. If he said that no book should be banned, book banning would slow down. But he won’t. And it won’t. 

Trump doesn’t allow books to be banned out of malice, though. He lets it happen because he simply doesn’t care about any book, banned or not.

Defying President Trump’s Indifference

“Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.”

— Elie Wiesel, US News & World Report, October 27th, 1986

Elie Wiesel was a Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor. He died in 2016. When he said that indifference is evil, he meant that it is evil to not care. I agree. I think Trump’s indifference towards books is an evil, one which reminds me of Stalin’s KGB and the book-burners of the Holocaust. And I want to resist it.

Like many Americans, I vote. I’ve been to protests against Trump. I’ve signed things and sent money to people. And I’m proud to have done that, but I want to do more. I want to live my life, as an individual, in defiance of Trump’s indifference.

But I’m also a student of history. And I have learned that the average person only has the power to change things as a part of a group. The few who enact change as individuals are those written into history books. And we can’t all be like them.

There was a colossal mob that stormed the Bastille and overthrew the French monarchy, but there was only one Robespierre. If I want to resist as an individual, I have to do it a different way. After repairing Everything Flows, I know how.

The problem with historical narratives is that they leave out the feeling of a time and place. They have to. You can’t explain how the zeitgeist of 1790s Paris would shape a person, and in turn be shaped by its people. It’s too complicated. But that’s how average people like me can resist as individuals—by reshaping the zeitgeist.

The best way to defy Trump’s indifference is to do the opposite: care. When I picked up the pages of Everything Flows and taped them back to life, I was caring for books. By doing that, I brought care into our cultural climate. One less destroyed book.

The more we become a culture of caring and not indifference, the more we will produce people who care, who will produce an even more caring zeitgeist. And eventually, we will create the people and the times which will refuse Trump’s indifference. And things will change.

You should absolutely vote. And you should go to rallies and protests. Resist as part of a group. But you can also resist as an individual, by caring: care for what Trump is indifferent towards, care furiously, care as defiance. Live your life caring.