3 ideas
At a wedding feast in an Armenian village, a carpenter rose to toast Grossman, whose own novel had been confiscated. He praised Grossman's writing about Armenians and said he hoped an Armenian would one day write about the Jews. Grossman answers the toast with a bow of his own.
Grossman attends to the concrete kindness or meanness of the Armenians he meets, such as hospitality, stinginess and petty bureaucratic cruelty, and he resists reducing them to national stereotypes. Yet he also accepts that national character exists and treats Armenian national pride with sympathy, so his objection is to the stereotype, not to nationhood.
Grossman went to Armenia to rework a word-for-word crib translation of an Armenian novel, a job he took partly for money after his own novel was confiscated, and at some cost to his independence. According to the introduction, the work involved substantial creative rewriting, and its discipline was in some ways restorative for him.