"We need some naïveté to continue to believe in the option to change things": Israeli novelist David Grossman

David Grossman and his younger son, Uri

"In our disjointed, cruel, cynical world it's not cool to have values. Or to be a humanist. Or to be really sensitive to the distress of others, even if the other is your enemy on the battlefield."

-- David Grossman

by Ken

First, a spoiler alert. If you don't know about israeli novelist David Grossman's family situation, I would encourage you to go first to the New Yorker website and read George Packer's profile of this perhaps surprisingly emergent and (not so surprisingly) lonely Israeli literary voice for sanity. You only get one crack at taking in the information for the first time, which had a powerful effect on me. I don't want to foreclose the same possibility for you.

For anyone who thinks of Packer as primarily a political writer, it may seem surprising to find him writing about a novelist. This is a clue that there's likely a political angle to the story, but for anyone who's puzzled to find him writing about Israel, he confirmed in an informative online Q&A with readers that he hasn't written about the subject before, or indeed ever visited Israel:

This was the first time I set foot in Israel or the West Bank. I've consciously avoided the subject. The arguments on both sides are too loud and uncompromising and intransigent. The history is too old and deep and, in a way, trans-historical. It seemed like the kind of story that one should devote one's life to or else steer clear of. I ended up doing it because this isn't a piece about "the situation." It's about one writer's life and work. It gave me a back route into the conflict, via the experience of a writer who manages to avoid the cliches and the overall stuckness of the situation.

The Grossman profile seems clearly timed to American publication of an English translation by Jessica Cohen of Grossman's latest novel bearing the English title To the End of the Land, which we're told -- I haven't read either it or anything else by the author (but I plan to!) -- embodies Grossman's deep feeling of the need for as well as the unlikelihood of a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which includes a state for the Palestinians. We're told that the book, "like all of Grossman's major works . . . emerged from a feeling of alarm and threat."

Packer presents Grossman as the third of a triumvirate of leading Israeli novelists, in the company of the older Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua (both friends and literary confidants of his). In the online Q&A he explains that he claims no expertise about the Israeli literary scene, but "when the Israelis I met talked about their greatest writers, they always spoke of the trio of Oz, Yehoshua, and Grossman."

Grossman, born in 1954, is enough younger than Oz (born in 1939) and Yehoshua (born in 1936), that he's the only one who was born in the already-independent State of Israel, making him an additional step removed from the founding generation of the Israeli Labor movement. He's an intensely patriotic Israeli, with a keen sense of the country's precarious existence among hostile neighbors. He served willingly in the Israeli armed forces, and has seen all three of his children do so as well. He is, in other words, hardly a traditional peace activist.

Yet, partly through his own journalistic work and partly through the influence of his significantly more liberal wife, Michal (now a clinical psychologist), he has evolved into a stubborn critic of aspects of the Israeli regime, especially regarding the need for peace.

Packer begins by telling the story of a walk Grossman undertook in February 2004 -- "half the length of his country, along the Israel Trail, from the Lebanese border, in the north, down to his home, outside Jerusalem" -- as a 50th birthday present to himself and as research for the book that became To the End of the Land,

about a woman, Ora, whose younger son takes part in a major operation at the end of his military service. Beset with premonitions and unwilling to wait around for bad news, she flees her Jerusalem home and goes north, to the Galilee hills, where she spends days hiking with a long-estranged former lover. Ora believes, or at least hopes, that she can keep her son safe by telling the story of his life to her hiking companion.

At the time, the oldest of David and Michal Grossman's three children, their son Jonathan, had recently finished his military service, and his younger brother, Uri, was about to join the same armored regiment.

The novel would allow Grossman to feel that he was accompanying Uri while Uri was away in the Army. Like Ora, he was engaging in magical thinking; though he knew it was childish, he felt as if writing the story could provide a kind of protection. . . .

Grossman was on the Israel Trail for thirty days, waking at five-thirty and walking about ten miles a day, occasionally joined by Michal. He stayed in rented rooms in farming villages, where, after dark, he took notes on what he had seen: the trees and flowers of the Galilee, a group of Arab shepherd boys. The journey frightened him. He was an urban man, afraid of navigating his way home from afar. In Israel, being on your own in nature has its perils. An Israeli soldier had been kidnapped near the hiking trail recently and murdered. As it turned out, the only dangers that Grossman encountered were a pair of boars and a pack of wild dogs; he faced them down, calmly, and was left alone.

During the walk Grossman was in text-message contact with Uri, whom he continued to update on the progress of the novel over the next two years, by phone and on visits home. (Uri is quoted as asking his father, referring to the book's characters, "What did you do to them this week?") The author broke his habit, Packer tells us, of showing work-in-progress to his wife and a handful of friends including Oz and Yehoshua. "This time, the subject was too charged."

As the book was nearing completion in the summer of 2006, war broke out between Israel and Lebanon. Uri, part of a tank crew, was in the thick of the fighting.

Grossman, like nearly all his countrymen, supported Israel's right to defend itself. During the weeks that followed, which Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, he travelled north and read stories to children in bomb shelters.

"On August 10th," Packer writes, "after a month of destruction, Grossman, Oz, and Yehoshua -- major public figures in Israel -- held a press conference in Tel Aviv."

They urged the government to accept a ceasefire under consideration at the United Nations and the Lebanese offer of a negotiated peace. Grossman warned against the illusion that Hezbollah could be defeated by further Israeli incursions into Lebanon. "Hezbollah wants us to enter deeper and deeper into the Lebanese swamp," Grossman said. "This disastrous scenario can be prevented right now." Grossman didn't mention that Uri, a staff sergeant, was a member of a tank crew in the thick of the fighting in southern Lebanon. His private concern was not the point of his statement.

The next night, a Friday, Uri called home, happy about the news of a possible ceasefire, promising his fourteen-year-old sister, Ruthi, that he would be there for the next Shabbat dinner. But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert widened the ground war over the weekend.

I'm sure you've guessed by now what comes next. The Grossmans received the news at 2:40am on Sunday, August 13, the day before a ceasefire went into effect. "Michal had left the outside light on," Packer writes, "in case of such a visit. As Grossman went to the door, he told himself, That's it, our life is over."

Uri's tank had been hit by a Hezbollah missile, killing the whole crew. "He was two weeks short of his twenty-first birthday and three months from the end of his Army service. He had planned on travelling around the world, then studying to be an actor."

(In the August 16 issue of the Guardian, Hillel Schenker, editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal, wrote a moving report.)

David, Michal, Jonathan, and Ruthi Grossman obviously aren't the first family ever to suffer such a loss, and sadly won't be the last. But it's important that we never lose touch with the reality of that loss, and Packer does a powerful job of communicating the Grossmans' devastation. Uri. we're told, had intimate bonds with both his older brother (looking at a grainy black-and-white photo of his sons together in a sailboat, their father tells Packer, "This is how they were -- in a world they shared, with their own language, a bubble that no one could penetrate") and his adoring younger sister (who, on hearing the news, wondered if their lives would go on). He recounts some of David Grossman's eulogy for his son.

Packer writes a good deal about the overwhelming outpouring of grief from the Grossmans' countrymen. For one thing, "The tragedy of the Grossman family resonated deeply in Israel, which is itself a kind of family -- an extremely quarrelsome one, its members arguing and complaining about one another, but pulling together in times of grief." For another, the Israeli literary scene, the appetite for literature that deals with serious issues meaningful to a serious reading public, is apparently orders of magnitude larger than ours.

During the seven days of Jewish mourning, or shivah, thousands of visitors came to sit with the Grossmans, writers and politicians and ordinary people, while their closest friends organized the shopping and cooking, and local restaurants sent food. Phone calls and letters poured in, including a number from citizens of enemy countries, some saying that it was the first time they had grieved for an Israeli soldier.

And then David Grossman had to figure out what to do with the hulk of a book he had thought nearly finished.

Among the first visitors to the Grossman house that week were Oz and Yehoshua. Grossman confided to Oz, "I'm afraid I will not be able to save the book," to which Oz replied, "The book will save you." Yehoshua told him, "Don't change the book. It is an organic thing. Go with the book, and the new elements that will enter, let them enter."

The day after the end of shivah, Grossman returned to his novel. Everything was now broken to pieces -- the world was no longer a home. Yet if this was to be his fate he wanted to explore its every nuance, and in this novel he could. The book would become his home. For that, at least, he was grateful. The story and the themes of the novel didn't change, but the process of writing became heightened, as if he were seeing with new eyes.

Within a year, the novel was finished, and in 2008 "Isha Borachat Mi'bsora" ("Woman Flees Tidings") was published in Israel. An English translation, by Jessica Cohen, appears this month, under the title "To the End of the Land."
Grossman told me, "This book was such an act of choosing life."

Packer traces carefully Grossman's personal and literary history, naturally focusing on the change in his political awareness. A crucial juncture was five weeks' active duty (he was then a reservist), less than a month after Jonathan was born, during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He went without reservation ("'I have no hesitation regarding serving in the Army,' he said. 'I know where we are living'"), but --

What Grossman saw in Lebanon cemented the political change initiated by Michal. Fighting an unwinnable war, the Israeli Army turned arrogant and brutal. To submit to an ideology of belligerence was a form of humiliation that destroyed one's humanity. In the years after the Six-Day War, the occupation of Palestinian towns and villages was so smooth and successful -- a kind of joint enterprise between both peoples -- that Israelis were hardly conscious of being occupiers. "I could not understand how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched," Grossman wrote later, in "The Yellow Wind." "What happened to us?" His first novel, "The Smile of the Lamb" (1983), was an attempt to grapple with that question. . . .

In 1987, for the 20th anniversary of the occupation, Grossman accepted a journalistic assignment from the newsweekly Koteret Rashit "to write a report on conditions in the West Bank," which he had been avoiding visiting.

In the West Bank, Grossman listened to old women, students, teachers, refugees, writers. The result of this sustained act of empathy filled an entire issue of Koteret Rashit. Presented as directly and concretely as Grossman's fiction is discursive and internal, the report was elevated by the authority of a writer willing to stand in the presence of bitterness and rage aimed directly at him. Grossman told Israeli readers that the occupation, far from stable, was breeding permanent hatreds and creating the conditions for a violent revolt. The impact of the article, and the subsequent book, "The Yellow Wind," was without equal in recent Israeli writing. Many Israelis hated what they read; Grossman described, among other things, how Israeli soldiers demolished the houses of suspected opponents. He received threats, and his car was sabotaged. Even today, after more than twenty years, if you mention Grossman's name to certain Israelis you will hear about his perfidy in writing "The Yellow Wind." Yet, as Oz said of the book, "Many Israelis confronted for the first time, in a deep way, the reality of the occupation." The notion of ending the occupation and allowing a Palestinian state -- at the time a taboo prospect in Israeli politics -- suddenly became thinkable.

At the end of the Koteret Rashit report, Grossman wrote, "I have a bad feeling: I am afraid that the current situation will continue exactly as it is for another ten or twenty years." Instead, within months of the article's publication, Palestinians rose up against the occupation in what came to be called the intifada, and Grossman's investigation suddenly seemed like a kind of prophecy. The next year, 1988, the Palestinian leadership announced its intention to create a state that would recognize Israel's right to exist. Grossman wanted to report this development prominently on his morning radio show, but his editor disagreed; the minister of security had issued an order to suppress the news. The next day, Grossman read in the paper that he had been fired. The end of his career with state radio, he later said, "doomed me to be a writer."

And a writer he has been, struggling in the years before he undertook To the End of the Land to find a voice in the face of the collapse of widespread public support for peace in Israel.

Now Grossman, described by Packer as an intensely private person, and he apparently feel acutely self-conscious about the celebrity into which his family's tragedy has thrust him. "I'm in a very strange situation," he told Packer. "I'm very private, but because of what happened my whole life is exposed like an open wound."

Since 2006, some Israelis have taken to calling Grossman "the conscience of the country." He dislikes the term. Historically, the Jews have suffered when others assign them larger-than-life status. And Grossman doesn't want to convert Uri's death into moral authority. He still holds the same political opinions that he held when Uri was alive. Even though Arab militants killed his son, he still supports Palestinian rights; even though he is alienated from Israel's leadership, he still sends his children into the Army. "When someone tells me, ‘I cannot argue with you because you are a bereaved father,' I say, ‘Bullshit. Argue with me, not with my emotions.' "

There is a Hebrew expression, yafeh nefesh, that means "beautiful soul" but carries the ironic taint of "bleeding heart," and it is often applied to Grossman. "I take it as a medal," he said. "We need some naïveté to continue to believe in the option to change things -- even in order to believe in mankind." Unlike many privileged Israelis, who hedge their bets with foreign passports and send their children abroad, Grossman gives himself no such out. Like Ora, he can't live anywhere else. What he wants is for Jews to feel at home in Israel -- something that strength and conquest have not been able to provide.

I've really only scratched the surface of this terrific profile. I can't resist including this story:

In the past decade, Grossman's connections in the occupied territories have grown thin, which only adds to his political isolation. But in Ramallah there is a Palestinian professor and writer named Ahmad Harb, whom Grossman first met during the illegal contacts of the early nineties; they remain friends, though they can't see each other. "We are like two groups of miners, digging a tunnel in a mountain from both sides," Grossman said. "We just trust that the other side does his share in his society as I do it in my society. And I wish that once we shall meet."

I visited Harb, a tall, painfully formal man in his late fifties, in his Ramallah home. His living room looked out over a hillside that was covered with Palestinian construction projects. In the early aughts, Israeli troops had the town under siege, and Grossman phoned him often to be sure that he was all right. Harb did the same after Uri's death. Harb had once thought of writing a book on the works of David Grossman, but the political situation in the West Bank wasn't right -- it might have led to trouble.

"Yesterday, I was talking to David about the possibility of translating one of my novels into Hebrew," Harb told me. "He said, ‘Honestly, there isn't much interest to translate Palestinian literature.' And if a Palestinian translated or taught Israeli literature he would be considered a kind of collaborator." There was no reason for this, Harb believed -- in spite of their enmity, the two peoples should know each other and read each other. But, for now, all that they tried to build twenty years ago has come to nothing. In a better world, he and David would be close friends. "I hope, sometime in the future," he said. "But it's like a phantom. You say, ‘At some point I will reach it,' but then anything will explode everything else, and you are back at square one."

As I left, Harb gave me an English translation of his new novel, "Remains," to carry the eight miles from Ramallah to Grossman's home, in Mevasseret Zion.

Maybe the most fitting way to conclude is with a quote from his eulogy for Uri, "buried at the end of a row of young soldiers' graves, under the pine trees in the military cemetery on Mt. Herzl, overlooking Jerusalem." After describing his son as the kind of Israeli "that has almost been forgotten, the kind that people today consider a curiosity," he said:

He was a man of values. In recent years, that word has faded. It has even been ridiculed. Because in our disjointed, cruel, cynical world it's not cool to have values. Or to be a humanist. Or to be really sensitive to the distress of others, even if the other is your enemy on the battlefield.

#