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October 24, 2008
Grossman's warning
Israelis must choose which future they want.
JENNA HANSON
On flights to Israel, I love to watch for the brown line of the beach that can be seen from the air as the plane approaches the Tel Aviv coastline. But this time, I am too tired. I do not notice that we are approaching until we are already over land. We touch down and a few scattered and half-hearted attempts at applause can be discerned from various individual seats. The captain gets on the speaker and reprimands us: "What is the matter with you?" he asks. "People usually clap when they land in Israel."
I look around and decide it will take a while until I can move anywhere, so I may as well keep reading. "I always thought this was the only place I could live," says Ora, the protagonist in David Grossman's new fiction novel Until the End of the Land, "now I am not so sure." The book is about a woman, the mother of a soldier, who is terrified that her son is going to be killed. To escape the terrible news she is sure will be brought to her door any minute, she sets off on a journey throughout the land.
The book has me totally consumed. There is something about Grossman's incredible ability to grasp the very essence of each character's humanity, something about the way he is able to honestly capture the issues with which the people of Israel are currently grappling, something about the fact that Grossman essentially wrote out his own future in this novel. The book was almost complete, the plot was already set – and then his fiction became his reality. Grossman is Ora and her son is his: on Aug. 12, 2006, in the last hours of the Second Lebanon War, Uri Grossman was killed, along with three others, when his tank was hit by a rocket and exploded in southern Lebanon.
How could it be that this author foretold his own tale? As I wait to deplane, I think about the man who wrote the book and about the pilot who just reprimanded me for my failure to clap upon touching down on holy ground. I realize why the book has me so consumed. The book is Israel, and I am travelling the land. Not physically, but metaphorically. I am reading and I am looking into the lives of people and I am looking into futures through which this country may pass. And they are all there in the pages of this book: the happy future and the sad future, the confusing future, the difficult and the satisfying futures; the future of peace, the future of obliteration. All the possible futures of this country are written in the journey of this woman who runs from the future of loss.
They are there, in front of us, all these futures, waiting for us to make a choice. And I know that no author could have written his own future anywhere else, because nowhere else are all these outcomes so possible and so close that they visit people in their dreams and hopes, in their nightmares and, sometimes, in their realities. And then I know that Grossman wrote this book as a warning – a warning and a prediction of what may come, if we do not take control of these possibilities. And yes, Grossman predicted his own future. It was possible here, due to the intimate connection with the land that so many people in Israel possess, the ability almost to feel its pulse. There is truth and urgency in Grossman's warning, sadly, perhaps more truth and more urgency than even Grossman himself knew when he first sat down to write his cautionary tale.
I think about my pilot, waiting in vain to hear the passengers clapping. And I think about Ora, Grossman's protagonist, suddenly questioning the value of the land she always thought she could not live without. Is this place really a miracle? Does touching down in Tel Aviv really merit communal applause? It is in these questions, I think, that one can infer Grossman's warning. It is a warning of the consequences of non-action, a plea to recognize our own agency. True, the questions are being asked. But the answers can still be positive. True, Grossman's son was killed, but is this place any smarter, any safer, any closer to peace, two years later?
Today, we have a choice between futures. The future of contentment, of integrity, of justice and of peace is within our grasp. It is ours to choose, but it is fleeting fast. We need to be courageous. We need to choose. To make a miracle. To make sure Israel is a place worth clapping for.
Jenna Hanson was born and raised in Edmonton and now lives in Jerusalem.
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