David Grossman

Grossman lost a son, killed during military service. It is a wound so immense that he feels > mutilated in memory.... a prisoner of a remote cell in the penitentiary of my spirit , as though "my life resembled something that never happened." And so he feels the need to create a tale. > That motherfucking thing that happened to me and my son, yes, I must blend it into a story, I must. With a plot, and imagination! And visions and freedom and dreams! Let it burn! A boiling pot!.... if I do not write I will not even be able to understand who he is now, my son, I mean Grossman imagines a village where everyone has lost a child, but they cannot fully express their despair by decree of the duke—that is, of power: > indifferent, slow, sluggish, without a doubt: an exemplary duke . The scribe is tasked with spying on the inhabitants to monitor any violations of the ban. In a way, he performs the function of the external narrator. He transcribes the voices of the grieving parents who, as in a Greek tragedy’s chorus, cry out in a funereal chant—at once sweet and wrathful—their own stories and their yearning to have their child back. Their chant gives voice to all the nostalgia and anguish of a bond between parent and child abruptly severed: the tender memory of birth and of his boyhood, the remorse of not having been a good father, of not having been close to him, the desire to smell his scent, if only for one last time, to touch his skin, to embrace him. > And suddenly, inside us, rises the vapor of his whole body, intact, and for an instant we can imagine: he is here . The immobility of grief could last forever, but it is broken by a man who decides to set out toward "down there," where he believes his son to be. The man’s desperate act sets the other inhabitants in motion as well. As in a sacred procession, they walk toward that mysterious place that is the afterlife. Their march halts before a wall, in front of which they drop to their knees > and each of them, and each of us, whispers their child's name And then Grossman understands that his son is dead: > I recognize the truth of these words. He is dead, he is dead, but his death has not died . Memory detaches itself from pain and, as far as possible, we remember without suffering. Yet then the story, like the ritualization of mourning, allows the son to be distanced: > it is only that my heart breaks, my darling, at the thought that I could find words for all of this . The book is a hybrid of prose and verse poem. Written in prose are the notes of the scribe and the reflections of the Centaur—half writer and half desk—who unquestionably represents the author. The verse structure is used for the chorus, which serves two functions: recounting the dialogues between the various characters, who, rather than speaking to one another, communicate with their lost child; and giving collective voice to the "wanderers," the group heading into the afterlife in search of their deceased children. The narrative form is typical of Greek tragedy, with the significant difference that there is no plot development, no final moment of genuine catharsis. There is no dramatic tension in the overarching plot; in fact, there is no real story. On the other hand, the narrative is introspective, entirely contained within the author's consciousness. The setting is Kafkaesque, surreal, not tragic. It is an interior journey in which the characters are nothing more than instantiations of Grossman’s despair, of his anguish, and of his desperate attempt to accept the death of his son. The lack of a narrative plot allows the detail to prevail over the overarching world of the tale. The narration fractures into poetic fragments, evocative in themselves, yet isolated and sprawling within a narrative context devoid of development. The reader must therefore surrender to the spell of individual words and phrases. Consider the following passage: > as in the moment when a newborn bursts from the womb and from the mother's body, my son's death transformed me into the father I never was, pierced me with a tear and a wound and a sense of emptiness, while filling me with his presence, which has overwhelmed me ever since with an intensity never before seen. His death made me capable of conceiving him. His death made me an empty shell of a father and also of a mother. His death leads me to bare a breast to one who will never suckle, and upon the walls of my womb, formed that day, carves with the nails of an escaping prisoner the tally of days spent without him. Thus, with a transparent chisel, his death carved into me an awareness: whoever loses a child is inevitably a woman . Why not read it? Too many evocations within a story devoid of narrative rhythm. In the end, it is boring.

In a 2011 book (*Falling Out of Time: A Novel in Voices*), Grossman observes that the grief over the loss of a child is so immense as to render a father > capable of conceiving him... whoever loses a child is inevitably a woman . It would therefore be easy to conclude that the author wished to adopt the mother’s point of view in writing this novel. Orah fears losing Ofer, her younger son who has gone off to war, and hopes never to forget him. She takes advantage of a long hike to recount Ofer’s life as well as her own (her love for her men, the childhood and gradual detachment of her sons) and thereby rip through > all those visible and invisible threads... that were moving around her and above her at that moment, (and that) wove together into a dense, gigantic web.... (but) how can one describe and bring a person back to life using only words? My God, using only words? Yet Grossman himself notes that the novel was largely written before the death of the author’s son, who died in August 2006. On the other hand, Orah’s narrative is so steeped in existential anguish and epochal pessimism as to transcend the theme of mourning, however devastating the loss of a child may be for a mother. What Orah speaks of is the story of Israel, a country in which there is no future for individuals, for familial and romantic bonds, or for the people as a whole, caught in endless conflict with the Arab nations > There, the sweet illusion in which they had lived until that moment had shattered, their clandestine cell had been discovered. For twenty years they had walked suspended in mid-air, on the edge of a precipice, conscious of doing so, and now they were falling into it. They would fall endlessly . Orah has just separated from her husband and is about to embark on a trek with Ofer, who has just completed his lengthy military service, mandatory for all young Israelis. Yet another war breaks out, and the young man decides to return to combat. Orah refuses to wait at home for the news of her son’s death and sets out on the hike anyway, accompanied by an old friend, Avram. Across an enchanted landscape, brimming with light, flowers, and forests, unfolds Orah’s slow, dense narration. It can be read on four levels. On the first level is the adult world, comprised of Orah herself and her two men, Ilan and Avram. Ilan is tall, vigorous, confident, and positive. Avram is short, pudgy, something of a poet and writer, in love with words. Orah loves them both. She marries Ilan, with whom she has Adam, but conceives Ofer with Avram, even though the latter refuses to act as a father. He is broken by the torture endured at the hands of the Egyptians, who took him prisoner in one of the many wars. The long trek provides Orah the opportunity to introduce Ofer to his real father, and also to revitalize the deep bond that unites her with Avram. Reaching back into memory unearths painful events, deep wounds, nightmares, ever spawned and fed by continuous, unending wars. Speaking of Ofer allows them to rediscover their old love, mutual affection, and an attraction never forgotten. A phone message, in which Avram’s new partner announces the “false alarm” of a possible pregnancy, shatters the rediscovered connection. Orah > sprang to her feet, planted herself before him, incredulous: and maybe you’ll have a daughter, Avram, a baby girl... You will remember... you will remember Ofer, his life, his whole life, won’t you? The second level is the world of the young, represented here by Adam and Ofer. The theme is unmistakably that of detachment, so often experienced by parents watching their children become adults. Gorgeous is the description of the embrace between Orah and Ofer, conveying a sense of growing physical distance. > I could embrace him only if he wanted it... Ofer used to hold her cautiously, carefully keeping his body at a distance from her breast, leaning down toward her in a ridiculous arch . But there is something more. The two boys are ready to serve their country enthusiastically, even unto the ultimate sacrifice. One episode tears an unsettling rift in this apparent certainty. When Orah accompanies Ofer to the military muster, she and her son are briefly filmed by Israeli television. The boy is swaggering; the mother, startled and uncertain. But as soon as the camera moves away, Ofer whispers to his mother: > if I get killed, get out of Israel. Just leave. You have no business being here... if this curse passes from generation to generation, then you have nothing to seek here . And then there is the third level: the childhood of Adam and Ofer. The pages dedicated to the two sons’ early years are the finest. With an entirely maternal sensitivity and delicacy, Grossman manages to fully capture the profound bond between a mother and her offspring. The rearing of the “two shoots” is also the pivot of the relationship between Orah and Ilan, as happens with all parents. > They delighted in splinters of memory and little moments that took on importance only between the two of them, turning golden, precious: the goldmines of their life . Yet small details—such as Adam’s nervous tics and Ofer’s decision to be an Englishman (a naive subterfuge to shield himself from the hatred of the Arabs that oppresses and terrifies him as a child)—show how the nightmare of endless wars intrudes into childhood itself, denying it any true serenity and marking the gradual estrangement of the sons from a mother who could not save them. > The memory of the flash of fear that had flared in her younger son, the dread that she might devour him, was carved into her mind like an ancient graffito. Go explain a moment like that between mother and child to Avram, she thought. And yet she did, she described it to him in detail, so that he would know, suffer, live, remember . And finally, there is the loss of human dignity: the fourth level of the narrative, the one that overwhelms everything. Ofer’s patrol forgot that they had locked a man in a cold storage room. “How could you just forget a human being?” It was useless for her to realize rationally that it could not be the responsibility of Ofer, a mere soldier; the idea that inhumanity had gripped her son as well, rendering him indifferent, completely overwhelms her, and > cracks and fractures widened and spread with great speed through the most delicate, intimate tissues... their family was disintegrating at an incredible speed, overwhelmed by a crushing force that seemed to have been lying in wait inside them all those years and was now assailing them with an incomprehensible fury, even with a strange, vengeful joy . Even in wartime, one would wish to live > a private, quiet life. Do you understand? A small, unheroic existence, keeping ourselves out of this damned fray as much as possible : to carry out, as Tolstoy puts it in *War and Peace*, “the real life of people... independently” of political and military upheavals. It is not possible. War invades peace, destroying even the most intimate feelings, the deepest relationships. Grossman’s novel is a kind of Israeli *War and Peace*, with a significant difference: there is no solution for Israel, it is impossible to drive away the enemy (they are too numerous, the hatred and the dead on both sides now too deeply entrenched); they are condemned to fight forever. Faced with such an atrocious fate, the reader would like to lose himself, and withdraw, into the novel’s marvelous imagery, so sweet and delicate, revealing a subtle, affectionate, and empathetic knowledge of both the world of childhood and that of womanhood. Why read it? A great masterpiece!

This book collects four lectures delivered by Grossman between 2004 and 2006. Two of them concern the nature of writing, while the others address the "appalling, ambiguous, and complex" situation of Israel. What unites the reflection on literature with that on politics is the writer's mission: for Grossman, it consists of refusing the > surrender of the possibility of understanding what I truly think... So that, perhaps, it would be better not to think, not to know, to entrust the task of thinking, acting, and establishing moral norms to those who certainly know better than I do . Grossman shares the view expressed by Vargas Llosa in the preface to *Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter*: literature originates from the writer's dissent from the world, from > what he would like to suppress, add, or correct in life . The starting point is, however, an inward search that recalls Pamuk, for whom > being a writer means being aware of the secret wounds we carry within us (*My Father's Suitcase*). Indeed, for the Israeli author, > the primary impulse that triggers and drives writing is the desire to invent and tell a story, and to know oneself. Moreover, the more I write, the more I realize the power of a second impulse, which cooperates with and completes the first: the desire to know one's fellow man from the inside, from within... to feel what it means to be another person . And thus the fundamental motive > is the yearning to voluntarily remove what defends me from the other , in order to overcome > the effort we make not to expose ourselves completely to the other... to preserve... the framework in which our multiform and erratic psyche is contained, and at times imprisoned . The pivot of this transition from the self to others is constituted by characters. > Writing a novel means, to a large extent, being fully responsible for a few dozen characters . To explain this statement, especially pertinent in light of the descriptive and psychological poverty of so many modern novels, Grossman relies on an apt metaphor. The writer is like someone who keeps dozens of people imprisoned in a cellar. > Every now and then he would do well to have a chat with them... try to defuse tensions... listen to their stories and memories, remind them of everything that is still left to dream of, to mourn, so that for a moment they forget the suffocating pit in which they find themselves . From this focus on characters arise the tasks that Grossman assigns to politics. > If there is one thing I would hope politicians and leaders might sooner or later learn from literature, it is precisely this way of dedicating oneself to a situation, and to the people trapped within it , to no small degree because of the traps those very politicians and leaders helped create. The mention of political responsibility leads directly to the lectures addressing Israel's dramatic situation. One cannot help but admire Grossman’s courage, but also his dignity, in directly calling out the Israeli government's culpability in pursuing an aggressive policy that is distorting the very foundations of the State of Israel, its institutions, and the rule of law itself, setting in motion an apparently irreversible process of "disorientation and dismemberment... of the public, social body." Yet Grossman’s most compelling reflection concerns an aspect seldom emphasized: the gradual disappearance of the > model of the universal, cosmopolitan Jew, who aspires to fulfill an intellectual and moral mission , supplanted by utilitarianism, brute force, and aggressive competitiveness. If the land of Israel was meant, in the ideals of Zionism, to end the Diaspora and render the Jewish people finally "equal" to other nations, fear and hostility toward others (first and foremost toward the Palestinians) perpetuate the psychological and spiritual patterns of the Diaspora—this time in an aggressive key. From oppressed, the Jewish people become the oppressor. It is futile to look in Grossman's lectures for the lightness and subtle irony of Pamuk or Vargas Llosa. This is not merely the author's style, which is invariably solemn, intricate, and meditative. It is the tragedy of the man—as an individual (above all, as a father mourning the loss of his son), as an Israeli witnessing the unraveling of his own people, and as a Jew confronting the betrayal of millennial values—that prevents Grossman from casting aside dark and tragic undertones. The anguish oozing from every word, the philosophical edge of his considerations, and the sense of an inescapable fate that can be counterbalanced only by utopia make for a heavy and demanding, at times repetitive, read. Only at certain moments does one emotionally empathize with the writer. It occurs when, in his magnificent commemoration of Rabin, he asks with dignity not to be judged with pity and indulgence as though driven by a "feeling of anger and vengeance" over the terrible tragedy of his son's death. Even grief can be wielded by power to silence dissent and critique! Why read it? The reflections on the writer and on literature are particularly compelling.