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March 28, 2008
About literature and peace
David Grossman's book became very real and personal.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
New York, N.Y.
At midnight on Sunday, David Grossman's latest book was released in Israel. Earlier that day, the Israeli writer was interviewed on stage in New York at the 92nd Street Y. The conversation was one of several events in which Grossman took part on the long weekend and, while literature was always the main topic, politics occasionally came up.
To be called Until the End of the Land when it is translated into English, Grossman's most recent work of fiction is the first he's told from the viewpoint of a parent. It is about a woman, Orah, whose son is in the army. She knows that he is going to be killed and so she leaves her home to go on a journey to northern Israel, taking with her a former lover, Avram. (Published by Hasifriyah Hahadashah, the literal translation of the book's Hebrew title is "A Woman Escaping Bad News.") She knows she needs to protect her son, explained Grossman to interviewer Prof. Adam Rovner of Long Island's Hofstra University. Orah does so by leaving her home because, she reasons, it takes two people for bad news: one to deliver it and one to receive it. As well, as additional protection for her son, Orah tells Avram all the details of his life.
Grossman said he began work on this book five years ago, in 2003. He did the hike that Orah and Avram make: "I love to be in nature," he said, adding that, when you meet people along the way and they are so open, "there's something so beautiful about such encounters." He said the overarching theme of the story is people's heroic attempt to create a family in "this situation," referring to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And three years and three months after he started Until the End of the Land, "my life met this story in a painful way," said Grossman – his second-oldest son, Uri, was killed in 2006 during the Second Lebanon War. Grossman was comforted by many at that time, including friend and fellow writer Amos Oz. When Grossman said to Oz, amid his grief, "I don't know if I can save this book," Grossman said Oz's response was, "The book will save you."
Until the End of the Land joins Grossman's already long list of fiction publications, such as See Under: Love (1986), The Zigzag Kid (1994) and Her Body Knows: Two Novellas (2002). His non-fiction work includes The Yellow Wind (1987), a record of his weeks-long time in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Death as a Way of Life: Dispatches from Jerusalem (2003) and Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson (2005). He has garnered numerous awards for his adult and children's books. His work has been published in more than 20 languages.
It is certainly in translation that most North Americans are familiar with Grossman's books and, when asked by Rovner about that topic, Grossman said, "I hardly understand the concept of translation ... especially of language," where every word resonates on so many levels and has such a long history. Despite admitting that it all works somehow, Grossman said, "I always find it painful to read me in translation. It's never the thing itself."
And language and its meaning are crucial to Grossman. He gave the example of See Under: Love, which, he said, was an homage to Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz, who was killed in the Holocaust. Schulz had been protected by an SS officer and it is thought that Schulz was shot dead by another officer, as a punishment to Schulz's protector. The exchange between the two officers was supposedly along the lines of "You killed my Jew; now I've killed yours."
Grossman spoke about such inhumanity and the loss of identity, as well as the manipulation of language by the Nazis. He broadened his comments to include the problem of reclaiming one's individuality in mass communication in general, which uses language intended to make people compliant with the larger system, be it government, the army or another part of the system. Journalism, for example, said Grossman "us[es] language as a barrier to real life." He spoke of the need to create, to use language to form a "climate zone" in which to breathe even in the most fearful of political climates.
Later in the discussion, in explaining why he had chosen a child as the protagonist in See Under: Love, Grossman said that, no matter how much we've read about it or how much we think we know about it, "When facing the Shoah, we are all children": we are so paralyzed in front of such evil. But "we cannot remain mute," stressed Grossman, after citing the response given by a character in his book to real-life German sociologist/philosopher Theodor Adorno's idea that there could be no poetry after the Holocaust: the wife character tells her husband, "Don't write poetry. Write about human beings ... the small things of life; that is poetry enough."
But Grossman takes on larger than life issues in his writings and, though an avowed secularist, he has thoroughly examined at least one biblical personage: Samson (Shimshon).
"I am not a believer and I'm not a religious person at all," said Grossman, "but I am Jewish" and, for years, he has studied Torah weekly with a three-person chevruta (study group). He remarked on how silent the Bible is on so many things, giving the example of when Laban gave his daughter Leah to Jacob, rather than his daughter Rachel, Jacob's beloved and promised one. There is a line about the switch being made in the evening, then the morning arrives and "behold, it was Leah." Many writers would want to fill in what happened that night, said Grossman, but the Bible says nothing.
He approached the story of Shimshon in a similar vein, looking for nuances in his character that weren't readily apparent from the text. He began with Shimshon's parents, in particular, his mother, who isn't even given a name. While pregnant, she was told by a man/angel that her son would be a Nazirite, a person set apart, who would save his people. This most intimate moment of a woman's life – having a child – was touched by another, which disconnected Shimshon's mother from her son, theorized Grossman, so even before he was born, Shimshon was separate from others and larger than life – condemned to choose women who would betray him; always yearning and always lonely.
Grossman connected the story of Shimshon with that of Israel, but first, in speaking of Zionism and of what constitutes home, Grossman said, home is "a place that I'm not a foreigner, a place where I can decode the language." It's a place where, Grossman said, he can talk to his government, even if they don't listen. "For me," he explained, "having this state is something that has an utmost importance. It is very important for me for Israel to be a Jewish state," a belief that, he admitted, wasn't shared by all of his colleagues on the political left, but, he said, "the world has failed to defend the Jews throughout history."
Part of being a Jewish state though, he added, is proper treatment of the non-Jewish population. Can we give them enough freedom? he asked.
He argued that Israel is not yet a home for the Jews, "not even a shelter" currently. "We can aspire for much more than survival," he said: before, we survived to live life, now we live to survive. "I want to benefit from everything that ... this country can provide me as a citizen," but that won't happen until there is peace in the region, he said.
There are no definitive borders, he explained, except for the sea, but there need to be borders, otherwise, it's like you "live in a house with mobile walls," there are no clear indications of where you begin and the other starts, thereby creating incentives to attack each other and redefine your space.
"I'm not talking about love," he asserted, but at least trying to get to a place of not wanting to exterminate each other and the development of a mutual curiosity, with gates (not a wall, "which creates prejudices and hatred") between, and with the world and the Middle East gradually accepting Israel and allowing it to stop being "a larger-than-life story and start to be one of the stories of many nations." This would save Israel from what Grossman called its "existential loneliness" and give it "a solidity of existence," which, in his opinion, is lacking, amid its glorious past and agitated present. None of us has confidence that we have a future, said Grossman of Israelis, and to change this reality is one of the best reasons for peace.
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