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November 14, 2008

Two worlds coming together

David Grossman wants his work to access human vitality.
RON FRIEDMAN

While most people spent Tuesday night glued to their television screens, witnessing the historic results of the American presidential elections, those who braved the weather and came to the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver to hear Israeli author David Grossman received a history lesson no less potent.

More than 300 people attended the event that was held at the Norman Rothstein Theatre, as part of the Dr. Robert Rogow Memorial Lecture series, co-sponsored by Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival. The theatre was packed and attendants had to turn people away. Grossman, who was being interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel for CBC's Writers & Company, spoke about writing, creativity, relationships, Israel, the Holocaust, peace, inspiration and, of course, his newly published book, Until the End of the Land.

Fifty-four-year-old Grossman is considered one of Israel's top literary figures, a writer whose books have been translated and read all over the world. An award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is also a political activist and one of the Israeli peace camp's most forceful advocates. But Grossman, who loathes stereotypes, offers much in the way of nuanced and thoughtful observation and interpretation.

The event happened to fall on Nov. 4, the anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. Appropriately, Wachtel's first question addressed Grossman's impressions from that night.

"I was there with my eldest son at the demonstration in Tel Aviv," recalled Grossman. "It was not a demonstration, it was a rally, a gathering, and a way for many, many people to thank Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for their efforts in favor of peace. I remember that, on our way back, we heard the first reports saying that some minutes ago shots were heard at Kikar Malchi Yisrael [now Rabin Square]. It was an example of how, in such a violent, but very simple way, history can change and how the course of history can take such a dramatic turn, because, after the assassination of Rabin, the peace process never went on track again as it could have gone. And I'm afraid that until now we are paying the price for that."

Over the last few years Grossman has become a vocal critic of the Israeli government and, specifically, of the current administration. "One of the most difficult outcomes of the recent war is the heightened realization that at this time there is no king in Israel, that our leadership is hollow," said Grossman in a fiery speech at the Rabin Memorial in 2006, shortly after the completion of the Second Lebanon War. When asked by Wachtel if he would say anything differently today, Grossman replied, "Basically, I feel the same thing tonight as I did two years ago. I think I would only speak in a more acute ways."

About his writing, Grossman said, "I want to write books that will take me beyond my everyday, beyond my fears and my limitations and my hesitations. Books are a wonderful way to achieve that and this is why I always like my books to surprise me, or betray me.

"Maybe I don't know any other way to take me out of myself and to jeopardize, to jar, my basic premises. I know that when I emerge from a writing process of a book after three, four, right now I finished a book after five years of writing, I feel totally devastated and I feel that nothing is taken for granted and all the things that I thought were stable and firm and reliable have been unearthed, shaken while I was writing about them. This is exactly what I expect my books to do."

Grossman's formidable bearing is enhanced by the knowledge that he is a bereaved parent, a father who lost his son, Uri, during the last days of battle of the 2006 war. Though rarely addressed directly during the interview – Grossman is known to be a very private man who does not like to discuss his bereavement – the weight of this fact permeated the whole discussion and rested in the background of everything he said.

Grossman's Until the End of the Land is called, in Hebrew, Isha Borachat m'Besora (A Woman Escapes Bad News) and it tragically intersected with its author's life. The book is about a woman whose son goes on a big military operation in the occupied territories and she has a feeling that something bad will happen to him. In a move that Grossman called both childish and magical, she decides that, instead of sitting at home and waiting for the terrible news, she will run away, out of a belief that if the message doesn't reach her, the tragedy will not occur. She takes along her long-forsaken lover and, together, they go on a journey across the north of Israel. During the trip, the mother recounts the details of her son's life. Grossman said that he wrote the novel after years of writing separately about his political views and his thoughts on the Israeli reality and stories with a more personal, human tilt. "I decided that I wanted to find a way to combine the general and the very private. I started it six months before my second son, Uri, went to the army. I thought it would be a way to be with him and partake in his experience."

After his son's death, Grossman said he told his friend and fellow author Amos Oz that he didn't think he could save the book. Oz replied: "The book will save you."

As part of the writing process, Grossman took to walking the land of Israel, hiking the same trails as the protagonists of the book. "I started in the very north and I walked something like 20 kilometres a day," said Grossman. On his way, he met many other travellers, as the Israel Trail is a popular destination. "When you meet people in the open they are so different. Many of the people that I met, for example, were settlers, which, usually if we met in any other context, probably there would be explosions of fire and rage. When we met in nature, suddenly things were a lot looser. We were not immediately representatives of our camps and we were able to talk, to have a real dialogue. I think maybe the conflict and our reality dooms us to refuse our emotional abilities. It makes you really stingy about your emotions. But when you meet in nature, the generosity of nature evocates this behavior – it reminds you of things you have forgotten."

For Grossman, remembering things is important. It comes across in his attachment to the Hebrew language, the Bible and Jewish history. He recognizes Jewish stories as being an integral part of the Jewish and Israeli identity. However, he warned against Jews seeing themselves as characters in a long-lasting, larger-than-life story: "If you are larger than life, you are not attuned to normal, harmonious life. You are not really part of the historic-political life. And I want to be part of this historic-political life." Grossman believes that it is only by Israel making peace with its neighbors and setting formal borders that the Jewish people will at long last achieve a "solidity of existence."

An unedited transcript of Grossman's discussion with Wachtel appears below.

On Nov. 4, Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Israeli writer Davd Grossman for CBC's Writers & Company, at the Norman Rothstein Theatre, as part of the Dr. Robert Rogow Memorial Lecture series, co-sponsored by Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival.

EW: This story is an historic evening because it is the anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 13 years ago. What does this date mean to you?

DG: First of all, in a very personal way, I remember it very well; I was there with my eldest son at the demonstration in Tel Aviv. It was not a demonstration, it was a rally, a gathering, and a way for many, many people to thank Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for their efforts in favor of peace. I remember that on our way back, we heard the first reports saying that some minutes ago shots were heard at Kikar Malchi Yisrael [now Rabin Square] and, of course, it was an example of how in such a violent, but very simple way, history can change and how the course of history can take such a dramatic turn. Because after the assassination of Rabin the peace process never went on track again as it could have gone. And I'm afraid that until now we are paying the price for that. And, of course, in terms of the polarization within Israel, the fact that one camp was willing, or one of the members of this camp, was willing to actually take a gun and to assassinate not only a person, but the whole idea, that the principles of democracy are not taken for granted by certain people inside Israel. All these, I think formulated a real dramatic change in the Israeli mind, the Israeli psyche, and as I said, we are still coping with the results of the assassination today.

EW: Two years ago you gave a speech at the annual memorial service for Rabin before a crowd of 100,000 people. It was a tough speech. It was delivered in the aftermath of Israel's war with Hezbollah. Would you say anything differently now?

DG: Basically, I feel the same thing tonight as I did two years ago. I think I would only speak in a more acute ways. The feeling is that this window of opportunity that we have is closing down and that it is so important for us Israelis to do everything we can to in order to shape our partner, so to say.

The Palestinians today are split into two – the more moderate part of the PLO, headed by Mahmoud Abbas the Palestinian president now, and the more fundamental and fanatic people of the Hamas who are in the Gaza Strip. Even though there are some people in Israel that are quite happy with the split amongst the Palestinians, they think it weakens them, and it does, it weakens them, but on the other hand I do not believe that peace is possible or viable with the Palestinians unless they reconcile within themselves, unless they undergo a process of political maturation in order to balance all the different urges and beliefs inside the Palestinian national psyche and only then we shall be able to have a real deal with them.

EW: The fact that you, along with other lead writers such as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, are invited to express your thoughts on important public occasions, this speaks to the value that are placed on writers in Israeli society. Can you talk about the role that writers are expected to play in the moral and political life of the country?

DG: I will not talk about expectations because probably there are many people who expect me to be totally silent. But in our tradition, the Jewish tradition it's the role of the writer as someone who speaks before the politicians speak. On the stage in Basel, at the First Jewish Congress in 1897, out of, I think, 10 people on stage, five were writers. Maybe that reflects on the good connections that writers have, I don't know, but the fact is that they were invited to be on stage and voice their opinions.

At first sight, I cannot say that writers are very influential, because if we were influential probably the reality would be totally different, but then I think, you know, there is some effect and some influence to what writers say and I think of things that Amos Oz said three weeks after the Six Day War or Isaiah Leibovitz, though he wasn't a writer, and I remember things I wrote in The Yellow Wind that when they were published in Israel 20 years ago, they were regarded as almost betrayal and they were regarded as radical left and now they're regarded as centre. Now people like Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert, who then called me a traitor against Israel, now the way that Olmert and other leaders from the right wing, I could have signed almost every phrase that they use. So it means that there's some change in public opinion and the writers are those who are able to formulate things for the reluctant politicians. We are able to do it because by nature, writers are people who see every situation from several points of view and they can envelope every situation from different angles. I think we understand that only when you describe a given situation from different points of view, only then you really control the whole situation and not only your limited point of view, not only your own projection of the situation, not only your nightmares or wishful thinking. In so doing suddenly the situation becomes real and you can redeem it from the deep freeze, from the paralysis, you feel that you are able to change the situation. And maybe what we can do – writers or someone who tells stories – is to remind people that there is an alternative, that we are not doomed to a situation. I think one of the worst things in Israel today is that people believe that they are doomed to be in such a situation forever, that we will always live by the sword and die by the sword. For me it's humiliating, it's insulting to think that we are trapped, that we are paralyzed in this situation without any ability to maneuver. Israel was created so that we shall never be victims again and look at us; largest superpower in the region, hundreds of Atom bombs, the biggest army, with all the abilities of Israel, and yet we behave as victims of the situation and do not really use all our potential in order to leverage ourselves to redeem ourselves and our neighbors from the situation. This is unacceptable; it shows of something really distorted, of how we are really victims of our fears of our traumas and of the situation.

EW: I would think that for a private person like yourself, who deals so exquisitely with the inner lives of your fictional characters, that the public role can't be an easy one. Can you talk about the tensions or conflicts that you experience between public and private and how you deal with them?

DG: I am a very private person. I know it's the wrong place to say it, [on a stage surrounded by 300 people] but believe me I am a very private person in my life and my family and my home. Maybe the best way to have some effective contribution in the public sphere is to remain very private and to express exactly what one feels and to point out nuances that you can see only when you come from the private dimension, speaking your private language. In such a situation as ours in Israel, after 100 years of war and brutal reality, one of the first things that is being forged and manipulated is the language. It is the first interest of the government, of the army, also of the media by the way, to manipulate the language, to create a false language, a whitewashed language. I called it in The Yellow Wind the laundry of language, the way in which phrases and realities that are too difficult to contain, that are too contrary to what we want to think of ourselves. There is a whole machinery of forging a language that we buffer between the citizen and what his government is actually doing. I think that in such a reality it is so tempting to join this language of the choir. I believe that writers are people who by nature feel claustrophobic in other people's words.

EW: One of your characters, Aharon in The Book of Intimate Grammar, feels he can't use words that other people have used, he needs to purify them by not saying them aloud for seven days.

DG: He creates for himself a new brain under his heart and he creates there a hospital of sick words. He absorbs words that come to him from the outside, from the radio, from conversations that he eavesdrops on by his parents and by people on the streets and he takes these words that people are saying offhandedly, without thinking, and he purifies them in a very complicated process and only when they are purified he feels entitled to utter them. They are his now and he can call them by his private name. I think this is what makes someone a writer.

EW: Claiming a quiet private place, away from the distortions and demands of the larger noisy Israeli reality is one of the themes of your fiction and your work itself very powerfully insists on the private realm. Why is that such a strong current in your fiction?

DG: Maybe because I see how easy it is to allow the situation.... Look, we say in Hebrew “HaMatzav.” HaMatzav is the general description for the ongoing condition of the last 100 years. It's kind of deceitful in a way, because HaMatzav sounds very stable, very frozen and rigid, but the situation is not really rigid, it's in constant flux, and in such a situation you feel how it is easy to be tempted to allow the situation to confiscate your privacy and I just don't like it. I feel like someone is trying to pollute the air I breathe, they try to impose on me the rigidity of uniformity. For me writing about the situation, about any given situation is a way to reclaim my individuality from this confiscation. In almost all of my books I wrote about an individual facing a kind of outer arbitrariness, outer imposure. Most every book is about an individual taking on arbitrariness and how one can maintain uniqueness in such a situation. How do you remain yourself in this flood that goes over all of us?

EW: There is almost a violent need to get to some place of truth within themselves in your characters. You bring the reader into almost an intrusive place within the character. Is that intentional?

DG: Yes.... I know.... Do you know any other way to write?

EW: Lets talk for a moment about Hebrew because so many Israeli writers speak of it as a language with such passion. Is there something in the nature of the Hebrew language itself that allows for originality or inspires this fierce attachment to words and belief in their power?

DG: First of all it's a language that counts back more than 3,000 years; some would say 4,000. I sometimes think that if Abaraham the patriarch would sit with us, with my family, at the dinner table, probably he would have understood at least half of the conversation of my 16-year-old daughter. It's something that you can have a language that transcends all those years.

I have been studying the bible for 18 years now. I have a "Chevrutah," a chevrutah is a very ancient Jewish institute of two (in our case three) people sitting together and reading the bible as Jews have done throughout history, reading the bible with a magnifying glass – sometimes we read one phrase for two or three months – and we see how the bible is relevant to us today.

EW: And you're a secular guy.

DG: I'm absolutely secular of course... but I'm very much Jewish. It is something that is so important for me and reading the bible allows me to connect myself with so many ancient layers of my people, of the way we think, of the way we look at things, of our existential position in the world... so many things. I can so much understand our politics today when I read about the biblical Sampson.  I can understand how we are regarded by other peoples when I read about Jacob and Lavan and the way he [Jacob] cheated on Lavan and the way he manipulated him. The minute we read the bible we see how much the structures of this ancient language prevail until today in our modern Hebrew.

EW: You learnt Arabic in high school and loved it as I understand and you talked about the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic and how they are sister languages that echo and mirror each other in different ways. You said that in fact studying Arabic helped you improve your Hebrew. How do you explain that?

DG: Hebrew I learnt, as everyone learns his mother tongue, in school. It's natural, it's instinctive, you do not really rest a little on all the structure and understand the logic of your language. When I studied Arabic I studied in a very intense way. And because they are sister languages and they reflect each other I understood the logic of the Hebrew much better through the Arabic.

EW: It's not only the noise of life in Israel with all its problems that drives you into the private realm of the imagination, it's also the silences and the things that have not been said. And you've said, "My generation, the children of the 1950's in Israel, lived in a thick and densely populated silence," can you tell me about those silences?

DG: It was the silence that followed the Shoah. Many of us were children of survivors. Event the others, like me, my mother was born in then Palestine and my father came before the Shoah, we all grew in this silence and those whispers that hushed down when we entered the room and the rumors and the effort that we had to go to in order to really understand what happened over there in the Shoah. I always think that in Hebrew or in English or in Yiddish or in German, in any language that Jews are talking about the Shoah, they will talk about what happened 'over there.' When non-Jews are speaking about it, they talk about what happened 'then.' And I think that there is a significant difference. Then means done, no more, over. Over there suggests that somewhere parallel to our reality it is an option.

I grew up in Israel in the '50s and the 60's, where it was so present, but not spoken about and not really allowed into our conscientious reality.

I remember when I started to learn about the Shoah, I was eight or Nine years old and my father first spoke about his childhood in the little shtetl of Dinov (Lvov). He gave me a little book of Shalom Aleichem, the Jewish writer who spoke about the life in those little towns and villages of Jews in Galicia and Russia and Poland. He gave me the book and said to me "Take it David. This is how it used to be over there." I didn't understand. There was something in his smile, a very childish smile suddenly on the face of my father. I took the book and I started to read it and I was fascinated. It was written in a very archaic Hebrew. The translation was very archaic, even then and the pages didn't have numbers, but letters like in the pages of the Talmud. Suddenly I had a revelation. I realized that there are other people that aren't Jews. I was sure that all the people are Jews. I grew up in Jerusalem, a very provincial Jerusalem, and somehow I thought that everyone was like us, and suddenly I realized that there is another minority of non-Jews in the world. And then I discovered that there are priests and pogroms and all the Jewish institutions of the Diaspora, the Shadchan. I started to put things together and there was this whole reality that was revealed to me. I think it was like how for children today there is Harry Potter, it was something concrete but at the same time magical and surreal.

I read all the books of Shalom Aleichem in a few months. I was sure that this reality existed parallel to our reality in Israel. I never doubted it. I had no reason to.

I had a little underground of the Jewish shtetl life in my life, in Israel, as an Israeli boy, who wanted to become a parachuter and who was part of the usual Israeliness, an Israel that in the beginning of the '60s had to recreate itself after the Shoah and really looked ahead, didn't look backward.

I remember at the memorial day for the Shoah, at the Beit Hakerem elementary school, under the blazing blue sky and the boiling asphalt, there was this ceremony, the usual ceremony and of course our teachers didn't know how to convey to us the atrocity of the Shoah and the meaning of it. They kept talking about the "sacred" and the "victims" and the six million. Six million is an empty number for a child, also for an adult, you know, it takes one Anne Frank in order to totally identify, but six million.... Then suddenly it pierced me that the six million are my people, are Mottel son of Peysi the cantor and Menahem-Mendl and Tevye the milkman and I remember how shocked I was, I couldn't understand why they didn't fight back. Where were their tanks and airplanes? I thought in modern Israeli terms. I think that then I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I think it's something that started then and something that I can only now understand about the power of the power of the story to go behind reality.

There was a point after I wrote two or three books that I felt that I can no longer live my life in Israel, as an Israeli, as a Jew, as a father, as a writer, unless I lived my unlived life over there in the time of the Shoah. And this is why I wrote See Under: Love.

EW: In your essay “Books that Have Read Me,” you say that the inspiration to write See Under: Love came to you with the haunting story of the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Shultz, who was murdered during the Second World War and that the chapter on Bruno Shultz is the core of the book.  Can you talk a bit about his life and his death and what it was about his story and his work that captured your imagination?

DG: Bruno Shultz is a Jewish-Polish writer who was born in Galicia and he is a genius. In every paragraph of Shultz there is an explosion of life and imagination and all kids of sub-currents and fantasy – if something comes out of this evening and afterwards you will go out and buy a book by Shultz translated to English, I did my job.

I didn't know about him. But after I published my first novel The Smile of the Lamb, you know how it is when there is a new literary baby around ... a new writer, it's like when there's a new baby in the family, he comes from the unknown. There is a need to make this baby ours, to make him understandable, so all the relatives are standing over the cradle and they say "ah yes ... he has the nose of uncle Yankel and the cheeks of auntie Bluma...." They make him belong to us and it is the same in literature. Immediately everyone started to call me and to tell me by whom I was inspired and from whom I stole.... Usually I must say that after I went and read, mostly for the first time, those writers that was recommended to read, I saw that my critics were right, I really was inspired or stole from these people who I had never read.

I got this phone call from this man who said "David, of course, you were heavily inspired," he was polite, "heavily inspired by Bruno Shultz." I was young and much more polite that today and I didn't want to argue, so I said "Yes, well maybe." That evening I was at the house of friends and I told them that anecdote and they said: "here we have the book."

I started to read and I was taken so much by it. It was like a letter that was written to me. I read the whole book in one take, in one or two days. At the end there was an epilogue, written by the translator, and there I read this anecdote that Shultz, when the Nazis invaded, became like a house Jew, a slave of a Nazi commander who used Shultz in order to draw paintings on the walls of his children's rooms. This Nazi commander had a disagreement with another Nazi commander over a car or money or something. And this other commander saw Bruno Shultz on a street corner, pulled out his gun and shot him dead. Later he came to Shultz's employer and said to him: "I killed your Jew." "Very well," was the response, "Now I will kill your Jew."

I remember I read this phrase and I was really shocked. I felt that I lost the will to live in this world, in this life. I left home and I strolled for several hours. I wandered back and forth near my home in Talpiot and I felt I just didn't want to be in a world that allows things like that to happen. The clash between the richness and the depth and the multi-layering of Shultz's writing and this terrible, sterile equation "I killed your Jew, I'll kill your Jew." I felt I needed to write something about Shultz that would in a way take revenge, not only of his death, but, in a way, on this terrible way in which his death was described.

I remember I told my wife that I want to write a book that will shiver on the shelf, a book that will contain one bit of the vitality of one human life, the life of Bruno Shultz. The book is trying to give a second chance to Bruno Shultz or to stories that went lost.

EW: In your novel See Under: Love the main character writes a story in which Shultz is not killed in the war but escapes to the sea where he develops fins and ends up joining a shoal of Salmon....

DG: Inevitably.... What's the question?

Ever since I was a child I was fascinated by the lifecycle of Salmon. They are born somewhere (near here maybe) in the north, they swim in sweet water, then they go down to the salted water and they swim in these huge shoals of two or three million members and suddenly they get this pulse in the brain and the whole shoal turns and goes back to the very place where they were born, they lay their eggs and when the new offspring are hatched, they swim over the dead bodies of their parents and they start the new journey again. Only one or two will survive another cycle.

I was fascinated by this idea, first because there is something so Jewish about it ... this thing about the pulse that you get and you need to go back home to the place where you originated as the group and as an individual. There is also something very Jewish in the urge to leave this place immediately.... But there was another thing. I felt that for the Salmon, the only thing they have is the journey. They just swim all their lives. They have only this movement of the journey. In a way they are like journey dressed up in flesh. I thought that if I touched them I would be able, metaphorically, to touch the edge of life, the vitality itself. Part of the thing that Bruno Shultz taught me in his writing is this vitality. I think that so much in our lives we feel that we are alive only when we are deprived of our vitality. When we are aging, when we loose some of our bodily functions, when loose our precious ones. Suddenly we understand that there was something and now there is something less, something drained out of us. I felt that I wanted to write about life, not as something that we are loosing, but really to try to see how we can be really alive. I thought that the journey of a shoal of fish that outlines the urge of life, that this would allow me to be there.

EW: You say want to be surprised, even betrayed by the books you write. What does that mean?

DG: It means that I want to write books that will take me beyond my everyday, beyond my fears and my limitations and my hesitations. Books are a wonderful way to achieve that and this is why I always like my books to surprise me. Maybe I don't know any other way to take me out of myself and to jeopardize, to jar my basic premises. I know that when I emerge from a writing process of a book after three, four, right now I finished a book after five years of writing, I feel totally devastated and I feel that nothing is taken for granted and all the things that I thought were stable and firm and reliable have been unearthed, shaken while I was writing about them. This is exactly what I expect my books to do.

We are so protected in our lives. We meet not only the people that we want to meet, but also within ourselves we meet only the areas that are bearable for us or are containable by us. But maybe we are not in contact with so many other parts of ourselves. Maybe we do not really know ourselves.

For me, writing is the best way. I think always that we are so protected from life, well we have the illusion we can never really be protected, we are time and again hurt and betrayed by life, but we have this illusion. We are so protected from the other – not only from the enemy, which may be understandable, I don't think it's justifiable, it's really not useful to be protected against your enemy because then you are not in contact with reality, but with your own projection of the enemy – but we are also protected from people who are very close to us. I sometimes see couples who are married to each other for decades and they are very good couples and they love each other deeply and they function wonderfully as a family, as parents and yet if you look through them you can almost see the moment in which they decided to strike this deal not to evocate all the elements, all the dimensions of the other and they congeal in what this specific other sees inside them and what they see in themselves. They do not allow themselves to all the pain that lies within the other. I think also that as parents we are very reluctant to see the dark corners within our children, it really threatens us.

Sometimes we think that when we make love we really know the other, but of course in such moments we do not really know the other, we are attracted to the more sweet, beautiful, attractive parts of our partner, not to the parts where he or she is devastated, tormented, miserable, ugly, we don't want to think about it in those moments. But when you write a book about a character you really want to expose yourself to everything that this character can suggest, just to surrender totally. I don't know any other way to surrender in such a total way. There is such sweetness to this totality of surrendering, of suddenly allowing others to inhibit you and to evocate parts of yourselves that you prefer not to know. So often we define ourselves against something. People say "I will never be like my father!" or "I will never be like my parents!" or the Israelis say: "we are nothing like the Palestinians! We are so different from them."

The more I write, I feel I want to define myself not against, but in a way to collaborate with other identities and to allow them to be part of my identity.

EW: Sometimes you say when you're having trouble with one of your characters you write a letter to the character and you ask, as if they were a real human being, What's the problem, why can't we make it, what is preventing me from understanding you. Do you get answers?

DG: Sure I get answers. The book is the answer. It happened actually twice. The problem was with Aharon in The Book of Hidden Grammar that I wrote and I wrote and I felt I cannot get there, I don't really understand him.  And then out of despair, it was really the last step before quitting this novel, giving up on it, I wrote him a letter. You have to understand that when I write a character and if I write it well (it doesn't happen all the time) but when I write a character that I really know, then it becomes a very concrete character in life to me and I want to know almost everything about it; how she walks and how she talks and what she dreams of and what are her fantasies and how she sleeps and how she makes love. Not everything will be in the book, maybe one per cent of it will be in the book itself, but I need to know, to relate totally with the characters, to know this filament that goes in the characters. I know that now when I talk about it, it sounds a little strange – also because I'm not writing now, I'm out of the book, I've finished the book – but when I was there I asked him what was the problem and what am I doing wrong and I think by the very writing of it suddenly the answer became clearer and clearer. Something I've learned is that all the solutions to all of the problems are already in the book. The book is always wiser and more generous and more courageous than the writer. Whenever I'm stuck, I know that it's only because of me, not the book. I am unable to read the book as it should be read. I am not mature, not prepared for what the book tells me.

EW: You also talk about feeling responsible for the wellbeing of all of your characters, like a person who is hiding a family in a cellar beneath his house during a war. Do they seem that vulnerable to you?

DG: They are vulnerable because so many things can affect them and change them. But I think I chose this metaphor of hiding a family during a war because of the total dependence of people who are hiding during war on the person who hides them. He has to feed them and he or she has to go once or twice a day down to the cellar to bring them food and water and to vitalize the mind and just to remind them that there might be life sometime after the war and just to talk to them about things that are a little loftier and richer than their miserable reality. And after he's done that, he has to take out their night-pots and to throw them away. Between this, the lowest human thing and the loftiest, he has to prevail totally, no one will replace him in writing that. No one will volunteer to write my stories.

I am not interested in writing the stories of Amos Oz or A.B. Yehoshua and they are not interested because they don't have this kind of very deep personal wound or urge that will make them write my story, they are not interested in doing that. Everything depends on the writer himself. It is the only thing I can think of in life where one is irreplaceable, even if we have a baby and something happens to us, there will be other people to raise him and to keep him alive, but if a writer dies in the middle of writing a story no one will be able to keep the characters in the way the writer intended.

EW: Your new novel, which literally is "A Woman Escapes Bad News," but which will be called in English Until the End of the Land engages directly in a way that we haven't seen in a while in your fiction with the violent and blunt reality of life in Israel and it also draws on the idea of the protective power of words and stories. It took you five years to write. Can you tell me about the genesis of the Novel?

DG: I wanted to write a book that would combine two things that I was unable, maybe didn't want, to write about in the 10 years before this book was written. There was a period that I felt that I paid too high a price for the situation around me, that I wrote too much about the conflict between us and the Palestinians, or about the Shoah. I felt that in such a reality as ours it is so easy to ignore the primacies of life. When violence roars around you it is easy to not pay attention to the important things, the relationships in the family, the love between a man and a woman, raising children. All these things, it's as if they don't have place in such an ugly state, all the energy goes into the conflict. I sometimes talked about us there directing all of our energies and our resources and the lives of our young people, our creativity, everything and directing it towards the borders of our being. I felt like we might end up like a suit of armor without a person inside of it. And I felt I want to write about the person inside.

Then I wrote several books about homeless children in Jerusalem. I wrote about the love between a man and a woman in Be My Knife. I wrote about a woman and her mother in Her Body Knows. And then I decided that I wanted to find a way to combine the general and the very private. I started it six months before my second son Uri went to the army, I thought it would be a way to be with him and partake in his experience.

The book is about a woman whose son goes to a big military operation in the occupied territories and she has an intuition that something bad will happen to him. In Israel there is this machinery of the army, they come to announce to you if something bad happens to your relative and they can come at every hour to give confirmation of the death. Ora, this is the woman, is 50 years old. She lives alone and she sits at home waiting for them to come with the announcement. Suddenly it strikes her that it takes two for bad news, one to deliver it and one to receive it. Then in an act that is half childish and half magical, as if she can change reality, she escapes from home. She will not be there when the announcers will come. On her way she sweeps with her a man called Avram who was the love of her life. He is not her husband, but he is in a way very much connected to the son Ofer who went to the army.  He never wanted to know about Ofer, he never wanted to know about this child. Ora takes Avram with her and she takes him to the end of the land, to the very northern border of Israel. And they start to walk there by foot, to wander around without any target, just to escape the bad news. They walk in the Galilee for several days or weeks and in the course of their walk she tells Avram about Ofer, about the child. She tells him about all the smallest details; from the way the child was conceived to the pregnancy and the birth and the breastfeeding, the raising of a child.

There is a place in the book where she says: "So many thousands of small actions, of efforts, of wishes, of mistakes are needed in order to accumulate one human being in this world," and then she adds, "One human being that can so easily be destroyed."

Through this walk Avram becomes more and more infatuated with the story of this child. And he himself who was quite a wreck when she picked him up, gets back to life. She revitalizes him through the story of Ofer.

It is a story about the fragility, the intimacy, the dependence of family life in this echo box of our very brutal and dangerous reality in Israel.

EW: You took a long walk yourself. You went from the northern border to your home in Jerusalem, 500 kilometres, what was your purpose?

DG: First of all, I love walking. I'm a walker. It was a wonderful opportunity to do it, a real journey. And I love to be alone, so it was an opportunity. I walked for something like 30 days. For five or six of the days my wife joined me and it was fun. But it's so different to go together with someone or to go alone. When you are alone you are so much more attentive to nature and your chances of meeting with wild nature are bigger. Israel is such a beautiful country.

EW: Where did you stay?

DG: I started in the very north and I walked something like 20 kilometres a day. And I met people on the way because there are other people doing it. It's called the Israeli Trail, it goes from the very north to Taba in the south, it's all in all something like 1,000 kilometres and it zigzags across the country.

When you meet people in the open they are so different. Many of the people that I met for example were settlers, which usually if we met in any other context probably there would be explosions of fire and rage. When we met in nature suddenly there was a lot more loose. We were not immediately representatives of our camps and we were able to talk, to have a real dialogue. I think maybe the conflict and our reality dooms us to refuse our emotional abilities. It makes you really stingy about your emotions. But when you meet in nature, the generosity of nature evocates this behavior it reminds you of things you have forgotten.

In a strange way, for example, this book was adopted quite enthusiastically by both the extreme left and the extreme right in Israel. I keep asking myself, what is it within the book that if taken outside of the book would allow the two camps to form allegiances between themselves. One answer that I received from a Knesset member from the extreme right in Israel, he told me that it brings back a sense of understanding of us, an idea that we had forgotten because of the polarization. The idea of the family that we lost and I think that we paid a high price for this loss. and I think we paid a high price for this stinginess of us, because naturally people need to be generous towards each other and are happy when they are good to each other. It's not first instinct to be bad to each other. But when you've lived all your life in such reality and when you have to be such a devoted warrior and develop those expertise, well maybe you loose some of these qualities.

EW: While Ora and her old lover Avram are walking they meet a man who asks almost everyone he meets, "what do you regret and what do you long for?" Why those two questions?

DG: When I prepared for this journey, I thought I would like to ask the people I meet a question or two questions because I thought it would open something a bit and I thought of these two questions. All the answers in the book are authentic answers of people who told me these intimate things and allowed me to quote me in the book. What amazed me was the immediacy of their responses, as if they were just waiting to be asked these questions. I'm not sure I can answer these questions for myself even after I heard all their answers.

EW: Ora intuits that something will happen to her son, but she decided not to collaborate with her fear and for her, telling of her son's story is a kind of talisman, a way of protecting him. Can you explain how that makes sense?

DG: What Ora is trying to do is to reload significance in all the things that she has done. This is her way to protect her son. She cannot protect him really, physically because he is in the battlefield. But she thinks that by those minutia of life, those details that she builds around him, she will be able to keep him alive, to surround him with her caring and her love and her affection.

EW: You started this book six months before your youngest son Uri joined the army. And at that time of course you had no idea that your life and this book would intersect so tragically. What can you say about that?

DG: I don't think that there is anything to say about that.

EW: How did it affect the completion of the novel?

DG: I knew that I wanted to have an open ending of the book. I thought that an ending in which we know whether the soldier was spared or not would be too easy, too cheap. Generally I like open endings for my books. And in this case this remained the same in the year in which I continued writing the book after what had happened to my son and to my family. But the writer had changed in this year and the echo box in which the Israeli reader, maybe not only the Israeli reader, reads the story had also changed. Maybe some acuteness of the story changed and maybe the understanding of the context have changed or became sharper both for the writer and to the readers. I can say one thing, when I was writing, as usual, I would speak to my friends A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz – we tell each other about what we are writing, sometimes we exchange manuscripts, I must say, it's very rare to have a relationship like this among writers in Israel and I am very glad to be part of this team – they knew what the book was about and on the first day of the shiva, they came to be with me and I told them I don't think I will be able to save the book and Amos, clever Amos, said that the book would save me. So I don't know if it saved me, but it was the only possible place to be and to lament and to continue with my life.

EW: You advocate a literary approach to politics. Can you talk a little about that?

DG: I don't know what is exactly a literary approach. I would call it a more nuanced approach or an approach that doesn't surrender to cliché or to stereotypes, but that rather tries to see every situation and every human being, even if this human being is my enemy right now, to see them in their wholeness, not to see only the things that are comfortable to me, not to hide behind the official legitimate story of the country, to allow the story of the enemy to infiltrate into our own story to see what happened, because maybe they also have their justice and their suffering. Maybe they also have their faiths and their crimes and their self-destruction and it's also necessary to point out the places where they terribly wrong or criminally wrong and just to call things by the names that I see with my own eyes.

EW: In your essay “Writing in the Dark,” you write: "I write the life of my land, Israel." And for those within Israel and outside of it, in situations for example like this one, you're never simply a writer but an Israeli writer. What does that mean to you?

DG: First of all it's writing Hebrew and this is a great privilege to be able to write in this language with all the layers, with all the associations, with all the residue of the Hebrew. Even though our constituency there is so limited – there's only one or two million people who can read this language or literature that is written for this language – and yet it is such a rich and nuanced and flexible language and caries so much weight and so much history. To play with the last updated slang or the last layer of the Hebrew of today against the background of the bible, I like it. I know how writers from other countries are really eager to be translated into Hebrew, even though they don't get any advances, but the idea that they will have a book in Hebrew on the shelf it's really something.

To be an Israeli and to be part of this reality, which sometimes is tormenting and sometimes I don't like it, but it's mine. That is the only place that I'm not a foreigner. It's such a refreshing change from 18 generations of Jews before me that I'm in my place. I'm not saying I'm really at home because, well maybe Jews never felt at home in the world anywhere they used to be, and Israel is still not the home I want it to be, but it might be this home and everything that happens there, even if I don't like it, is relevant to me and I like this feeling of being in the relevant element of myself and where everything is significant to me. In Israel I can speak about my identity in Hebrew and my identity is not a split identity like you experience here.

EW: You said last year that for normal people it can be quite tough to live in Israel, but for a writer there is no better place.

DG: I must agree with myself... It's so vital being there and the questions are really so prime and basic and the moral dilemmas and everyday reality and the proximity of life and death and the feeling that we are now ... that this is the generation after so many dozens of generations of this very loaded and tragic history and we have the ability maybe to change and for the first time in our history to stand anew vis-à-vis our destiny, vis-à-vis our history and not be victims of this history, but rather to shape it. All these make this place such an interesting place and you can add to that the fact that almost every Jew has a story. For example, every Jew that was spared from the Shoah is a miracle. There are such wonderful rich stories there, you just have to go and collect them and document them.

All the above can make the life of a normal human being quite anguishing and exhausting, but I love this exhaustion.

EW: I was just thinking about something you said earlier, about your realization of the Shoah, when you were eight years old and you read the books by Shalom Aleichem and in your book Writing in the Dark, you talk about these silences that you encountered when you were growing up in Israel and how difficult they were and how they almost drive one of your characters crazy, but yet with your own children, when they were very young, your son was three and he asked you what is a Nazi, suddenly you didn't want to talk about it either.

DG: I didn't want to tell him because I felt that once this pure an naïve child would be exposed to the landscapes of human brutality as performed in the Shoah, he would never again be pure and he would not be the child he used to be.  Growing up after the Shoah, after the drama, trying to create a state, a democracy – forget about that – trying to believe in mankind or to bring children to this world after everything we know about what human beings are able to do to each other, to inflict on each other, it takes a lot of effort.

Think of the Shoah, the wars that we have experienced over the years. All this uncertainty of our being, of our future.... You know, if you read in a Canadian or American paper that America or Canada plans its wheat harvest for the year 2028, it sounds perfectly normal, natural. No sane Israeli will make plans for 20 or 30 years ahead. When I think about it I feel a pain in my heart as if I violated a taboo by allowing myself too much focus on the future. We do not really believe in our ability to survive. It's really something very basic. It has to do with the threats against Israel, they exist, but there is something inside us that is so uncertain about ourselves and about our vision for the future. There is still something we are missing that we have not achieved even after 60 years of sovereignty and independence. This is something I believe that only peace will bring about. Only then we shall be able to recover and to become in a way normal.

We are regarded in the eyes of the whole world as the people of the book. But I think that we are even more, the people of the story. We provided humanity since the dawn of our being as people, with stories that were larger than life. We are the providers of larger than life stories. Since the bible and the myth of Masada and the Shoah and the war of 48 and the creation of Israel and the Six Day War and the Entebbe Operation and the bringing to Israel of the Ethiopian Jews. Every year there are two or three larger than life stories that only Israel can create. I think there is something to it that we started to think of ourselves, in a way, as a story. And if you think of yourself as a story and others are looking at us, not as a people per se and not as human beings per se, there is only this ambiguity regarding the Jew and the Jewish people. This ambiguity allowed others to project upon us so many genocides and prejudices and superstitions. We were never really regarded as something concrete. I fear this state of mind of being a larger than life story, because if you are larger than life you are not attuned to normal harmonious life. You are not really part of the historic-political life. And I want to be part of this historic-political life. I think that only having peace with our neighbors will allow us to move on form this absolute uniqueness to the extent of being unreal. Having peace, settling on our own land, having borders ... you know we don't have border, 60 years old and still we don't have fixed borders. It is like living in a house where all the walls are mobile; all the time you don't know where you end and the other starts. There is always this double temptation for others to attack you, to invade you and for you to be over defensive and sometimes invade them.

I want borders. I want borders between us and a Palestinian state. Not a wall. Not this terrible wall that will only generate more and more stereotypes and hatred and terror, but borders, like borders that exist between two normal neighbors, with a gate that will allow anything to commute; humans, trade, ideas, but borders because both peoples, us and the Palestinians, we are so distorted when it comes making borders of knowing your own borders. When we have peace with the Palestinians, hopefully I don't know when it will happen, we shall have this idea of a state, we shall be rooted in our land in our country. There we shall be at home, we shall have a sense of solution, a sequence of generations and we shall enjoy something that I don't even know how to utter it, but it is something that we have been deprived of as a people for so many years. We shall enjoy the solidity of existence. This is something that I yearn for, to experience this solidity that maybe people here in Canada or in America or in France or in Holland can take for granted, but not for me and not for us. We don't have this solidity. I dream about this reality as is described in the prayer of musaf in Shabbat afternoon: "Titaenu beGvulainu," plant us within our borders. Then we shall understand that this is our place. I believe that only then we will be able, not only survive from one catastrophe to another, because you see we are trapped in this paradox of the survivor throughout our history. All our history we have survived to live our life and eventually we lived to survive only. This is not enough. When you are in an extermination camp then you should do everything you can to survive, not when you have the largest army in the region. You must use this army in order to change the situation and then when we have changed the situation, when we have peace with our neighbors, hopefully they will also be mature enough to make the concessions needed to make a solution. Then we will be able....

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