“This book was, for me, the act of choosing to live,” David Grossman said of his new novel, To the End of the Land.
In February 2004, David Grossman set out to walk half the length of his country, following the hiking route known as the Israel National Trail, from the Lebanese border to his home near Jerusalem. The trip, a gift to himself for his fiftieth birthday, was meant to supply material for a new novel he had begun the previous May — a novel centered on a woman, Ora, whose youngest son takes part in a major operation at the end of his military service. Seized by premonitions and refusing to wait for bad news, she flees her home in Jerusalem and heads north toward the hills of Galilee, where she spends her days walking with a former lover she has long since lost touch with.
Ora believes, or at least hopes, that by recounting her son’s life to her walking companion she can keep him safe. Like all of Grossman’s major works, this new novel was born of a sense of dread and threat that he wanted to confront so as not to fall victim to it. At the time, Grossman’s second son, Uri, was about to join the armored corps in which his older brother, Jonathan, had just completed his military service. The novel would let Grossman feel that he was accompanying Uri throughout his absence, throughout his army service. Like Ora, he resorted to magical thinking; even as he knew it was childish, he felt that writing the story might offer a kind of protection.
Grossman’s writing has a lyrical intensity that brings the reader fully into the inner states of his characters. But he has also been a journalist his whole career, and he grounds his fiction in real fact. Before beginning his best-known novel — See Under: Love (1986), a dizzyingly inventive exploration of the Holocaust — there were so many books bearing swastikas on their covers in the small Jerusalem apartment where he and his wife, Michal, lived that he moved his workplace to a studio. For The Yellow Wind (1988), a documentary investigation of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank that made Grossman internationally famous, he spent nine weeks interviewing Palestinians. In the 1990s, for six months, several evenings a week, he joined a team of investigators before writing The Zigzag Kid (1998); then, for nine months, he spent most of his time with street teenagers in order to write Someone to Run With (2003), his most popular novel in Israel.
For thirty days, Grossman walked the Israel National Trail, waking at 5:30 every morning to cover about ten miles on foot. Michal joined him from time to time. He stayed in rooms rented from local families, in farming villages where, at nightfall, he wrote notes on everything he had seen: the trees and flowers of Galilee, or a group of young Arab shepherds. The trip frightened him. He is a city man, and finding his way, so far from home, scared him. In Israel, being alone in nature can prove dangerous. An Israeli soldier had recently been kidnapped near the trail and murdered. In fact, the only dangers Grossman faced were a group of wild boar piglets and a pack of feral dogs. He passed by calmly, pretending to ignore them, and they left him alone.
All along his journey he received texts from Uri telling him he was proud of him. Uri was serving mainly in the occupied territories. He was on duty at checkpoints or on patrol, and as Grossman advanced in his novel, his son followed the characters through their phone conversations and his leaves at home. And he would ask: “What did you do to them this week?” It is Grossman’s habit to show his work in progress to Michal and to a handful of friends, including his two peers among Israeli novelists, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. But this time the subject was too heavy.
The novel was nearly finished when, in July 2006, fighters of the Shiite Lebanese Hezbollah launched missiles across the Israeli border, killing three soldiers and kidnapping two others, who were fatally wounded. Grossman, like nearly all his fellow citizens, supported Israel’s right to defend itself. In the weeks that followed what Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, he traveled north and read stories to children in the shelters. On August 10, after a month of destruction, Grossman, Oz, and Yehoshua, leading public figures in Israel, held a press conference in Tel Aviv. They urged the government to accept a UN-brokered cease-fire and a Lebanese offer of a negotiated peace. Grossman warned against the illusion that Hezbollah could be beaten by further Israeli incursions into Lebanese territory: “Hezbollah wants us to sink as deep as possible into the Lebanese quagmire,” he said. “We can avoid this disastrous scenario right now.” Grossman did not mention that Uri, a staff sergeant, was a member of a tank crew on the front line in southern Lebanon. His personal anxiety was not the subject of his stand. The following night, a Friday, Uri telephoned home, glad at the news of a possible cease-fire, and promised his fourteen-year-old sister, Ruthi, that he would be back for the Shabbat meal the following week. But the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, extended the ground war through the weekend.
On Sunday, August 13, at 2:40 in the morning, the doorbell at Grossman’s home rang. Over the intercom a voice said: “On behalf of the Mayor’s office.” Michal had left the entrance light on in case of such a visit. As he walked to the door, Grossman said to himself: “That’s it, our life is over.”
Uri had been killed the night before, on Saturday night, along with his entire crew, when his tank was struck by a Hezbollah missile in the Lebanese village of Hirbet K’seif. These were the last hours of the war. A cease-fire took effect on Monday. In two more weeks he would have turned twenty-one. He had only three months of military service left. He had planned to travel around the world and then study to become an actor.
At dawn, David and Michal went up to wake Ruthi and tell her the news. After crying, she said: “But we’re going to go on living, aren’t we? We’ll take trips like before, and I want to keep singing in the choir, and we’ll keep laughing the way we always do.” David and Michal embraced their daughter and promised her that they would go on living.
At the same time, people had begun to flood the Grossmans’ living room. The news had spread like wildfire through the small country and through the family’s wide circle of friends. Many had heard of Uri’s death before his parents even learned of it. During the seven days of Jewish mourning, the shiva, thousands of visitors came to see the Grossmans — writers and politicians as well as ordinary people — while their closest friends handled the shopping and the cooking and nearby restaurants sent over food. Phone calls and letters arrived from everywhere, including from citizens of enemy countries, some saying that it was the first time they had grieved the death of an Israeli soldier. A stranger, a woman, wrote to Grossman: “I think you and I were on the same balcony, and chance had it that the assassin’s bullet struck you and not me.” The Grossman family’s tragedy had a powerful impact across Israel, a country that is itself a kind of family — a very quarrelsome family whose members are forever arguing and complaining, but who, in adversity, close ranks.
Uri Grossman was buried at the end of a row of graves of young Israeli soldiers, beneath pine trees, in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl overlooking Jerusalem. David Grossman was the last to speak at the grave. He addressed his son directly, as a loved one and as a friend, and he recalled his vitality, his kindness, and his sense of humor: “Once, we were in the car, and Michal and I were discussing a book that had just come out and that everyone was talking about; I mentioned the names of a few novelists and critics, and Uri, who was nine at the time, sat up in the back seat and exclaimed, ‘Hey there, you elitists! May I draw your attention to the fact that there is a normal young boy here who understands absolutely nothing of what you’re saying?’” He described Uri in words that have often been used to describe Grossman himself: “the kind of Israeli we have almost forgotten, and whom we regard as a curiosity these days.” He went on: “He was a man steeped in values. Lately that word has lost its meaning. It is even mocked, because in our deranged, cruel, cynical world it is not good to have values, or to be a humanist, or to be truly sensitive to the misfortune of others, even if the other is your enemy on the battlefield.” Grossman did not speak specifically of politics and did not name the country’s leaders: “We, our family, have already lost in this war,” he said; “the State of Israel takes stock, and we withdraw into our grief.” Then he closed with a farewell: “My love, it is a great privilege to have lived with you. Thank you for all the moments when you were one of us.”
Among the first visitors to come to the Grossmans’ that week were Oz and Yehoshua. Grossman confided to Oz: “I’m afraid I won’t be able to save this book.” To which Oz replied: “This book will save you.” And Yehoshua told him: “Don’t change this book, that’s essential. Follow the book and the new elements that will come into it — let them in.”
The very day after the shiva ended, Grossman went back to his book. Now everything was dislocated. The world was no longer a safe dwelling. Yet, since this was his fate, he might as well explore every facet of it, and it was in his novel that he could do so. The book would become his home. For that, at least, he was grateful. The theme and the story of the novel did not change, but the process of writing was amplified, as though he were seeing with new eyes. In less than a year the novel was finished, and in 2008 Isha borachat mi’bsora — To the End of the Land — was published in Israel. And Grossman told me: “This book represented the decision to live.”
Grossman lives in Mevasseret Zion, a quiet suburb in the hills above Jerusalem, from which one can see an Arab village, Beit Iksa, that has been a site of antagonism between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. A stone staircase descends from the road to the house, which is wedged between its neighbors and covered with flowering vines. It is an unassuming place. The main room is in a pleasant disorder, and a terrace overlooks a small garden with rosebushes, potted geraniums, and a view across a valley of thorn trees toward Jerusalem. During my visit in July, the phone rang constantly, a parakeet sang in its cage, and Ruthi played “Good Vibrations” on the piano while Michal and Jonathan came and went through the room. Ruthi, a bright, blonde girl beloved by everyone, was to receive her high-school diploma the next evening; a little later in the summer she would begin her three years of military service. Jonathan, a tall twenty-eight-year-old with red hair and a soccer jersey, was getting married within the next two weeks. David and Michal were about to find themselves alone in an empty nest, and all these milestones created an atmosphere of muted excitement and stress. Michal, a clinical psychologist, smiled and said in a calm, warm voice: “It’s too much emotion for us.” On one of the shelves behind the couch was a photograph of Uri, blond, in glasses, with a glint of mischief in his eyes.
Grossman is a slight man, slim-waisted and narrow-hipped, standing straight on his legs, with muscular arms. His physical fitness is maintained by a daily morning walk and the practice of yoga. Although his nose and mouth are marked by deep lines, his reddish-blond hair gives him a youthful air, heightened by large, sensitive eyes. He seems to carry within him the world of the young boy who still lives in him. “He is a determined, strong man with a child’s gentleness,” Oz says of him. “It’s a very rare combination.”
And indeed, childhood is very present throughout Grossman’s work: he has written several books for children and a play about three-year-olds; among his novels, the main narrator of See Under: Love, Momik, is nine years old, and in The Book of Intimate Grammar (1991), the protagonist, Aron, is a boy of twelve who has stopped growing. Michal Rovner, a major Israeli artist who has collaborated with Grossman on several projects, says of him: “The first thing that strikes you about him is his vulnerability. He doesn’t try to protect himself. He is like E.T. — as if he had been sent from another planet, with his extreme, almost raw-nerved sensitivity, to detect every facet of the human society he lives in.”
Day after day, Grossman wears the same plain shirt, plain trousers, and black walking shoes. He owns only one tie, for special occasions, a tie with the knot already made, since he never learned to tie one. He works in a room he rents, with no telephone, not far from his house, or in an office set up in the basement across from Michal’s practice, on the other side of the entrance hall. On a shelf above his desk is a framed line: “I had no idea I was going to write this.” There is also a card with a quotation from Margaret Mead: “Never underestimate the ability of a small group of individuals to change the world. In truth, they are the only ones who ever have.”
Among various editions of his works is a seven-volume classical Hebrew dictionary. Grossman is a man of the left and an atheist, yet every Thursday evening for twenty years he has studied the Hebrew Bible, at the rate of a few verses a month, with two friends: a poet whose political views are diametrically opposed to his own and an observant philosopher. On the desk, a black-and-white photograph shows Uri and Jonathan sitting on the rail of a sailboat in a Turkish bay, looking at each other through the vertical rigging: an image veiled in a haze-laden atmosphere and pearly water. Grossman says of his sons: “That’s how they were: they shared the same world in their own language, a bubble no one entered.”
At the back of the office, a half-moon window filters light from the garden, illuminating a number of plants and desert stones that Grossman used to collect with Uri. A punching bag hangs from the ceiling on a chain: “It was very useful in the early years, I can tell you! It still is sometimes — we all need a punching bag; it’s better than using a human being as one,” he said.
On a shelf, beside a photograph of his parents in their youth, stands a five-volume Hebrew edition, bound in red morocco, of the works of Sholem Aleichem. When Grossman was eight, his father, a bus driver and an avid reader, gave him a copy of the Yiddish writer’s last book, Motl, the Cantor’s Son. “Take it, David,” his father had said with an apologetic smile, “this is how it was back there.” Grossman’s paternal grandmother had come from Galicia in Poland. In 1936, a Polish policeman stopped her in the street and spoke to her with hostility. The young widow, who never quite had her feet on the ground, at once took her two children and left for Palestine. Grossman’s mother was born in Palestine to parents who also came from Poland, where his father’s family was entirely wiped out. Grossman was born in Jerusalem in 1954 and grew up in the young country of Israel, where authority was revered — with the scout troops, the collective labor, and the military heroes. The atmosphere of national solidarity and collective repression was so heavy that even the Beatles were barred from visiting by Ben-Gurion’s government, then in power, and television was not authorized until 1968, for fear of its corrupting influence.
The Holocaust was a memory that was not to be spoken of, one that left two generations — that of David Grossman’s parents and that of their own parents — marked by a sense of profound insecurity, a distrust of others, and an inability to utter the word “Germany.” Although his mother was only twenty when David was born, a gulf separated him from his parents, whose lives had been built on foundations that threatened to collapse at any moment.
“Michal and I have lost a son,” Grossman says. “I see the energy and the constant struggle it takes to remain oneself after such a tragedy. My grandfather lost his entire family, his entire town, all his friends, everything. And you expect him to behave in a normal, friendly way? It takes enormous work on oneself to still believe in humanity, to trust anyone, to believe that a future is still possible, to want to bring children into the world. What a superhuman feat, after the Shoah, to raise children! It is an act that amounts to choosing to live. Just imagine that your whole being is submerged by the water of death, that the weight of grief is so great — truly, it is a force I cannot even describe — and yet you manage to tear yourself free, to come back up to the surface, and not only that, but also to give life to another human being.” He adds: “It is pure heroism. All those broken people who came to Israel and accomplished this, sometimes clumsily, because they were incapable of giving love, or, of course, of being happy.”
For Grossman, a provincial little boy who lived in a public-housing neighborhood in Jerusalem, reading Sholem Aleichem’s stories of the shtetl was to open a window onto the Old World, onto the vanished world of his fathers, where Jews were a defenseless minority in Christian territory. In those tales, the mysteries of adulthood were revealed. But when Grossman mentioned the book to his best friend, the boy gave him “a strange look,” so that he quickly understood that the reality of Sholem Aleichem had to belong to his inner life and could in no way be shared. These stories revealed to Grossman, “a very Israeli child” marveling at growing up in a new country, the power of words to evoke a buried past. Sholem Aleichem spoke to something in him that was isolated and solitary, “something diasporic,” which ran counter to the virile, self-mockery-free figure that was the model for most Israeli boys.
He began writing stories on the little Erika typewriter with which his mother, a housewife, earned a bit of money typing up papers for students at the Hebrew University.
Although he has a younger brother, Nir, who works in insurance, Grossman speaks of his childhood and adolescence as if he were an only child, and describes his transformation into an artist as a solitary, desperate struggle. In The Book of Intimate Grammar, he enters the imagination of a boy defending himself against the invasive adult world during the months leading up to the Six-Day War. After attending the premiere of the film adaptation of the novel, at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July, Grossman said: “It brought back the claustrophobia of families that belonged to that world, in the sixties — the apartments, the suffocating relationships, the intrusion.”
At the age of nine, Grossman heard a quiz show on state radio announcing a competition on the work of Sholem Aleichem. His parents forbade him to take part. So he secretly mailed a postcard to the program’s producer. A week later he was invited to a preliminary audition, and in that situation his parents could not refuse. In every round of the series, he beat the adult opposite him. Some were professors of literature, among them a few of his future critics. But he was not allowed to compete in the final, because the radio’s executives decided it was bad for a child to win two hundred dollars. “Can you imagine the values that prevailed back then?” Grossman asks, laughing — “those ascetic, non-capitalist, non-materialist values.” By way of compensation, he was sent off as a young actor to take part in radio adaptations of works of world literature, and then as a young correspondent dispatched all over the country (accompanied by his mother) to interview prominent Israelis. It became a full-time job, which he did after school. And he spent the next twenty-five years employed by state radio as an actor, playwright, reporter, and host. If Sholem Aleichem opened Grossman to words, radio and theater took him away from his family, ushering him into the bohemian world of people “who have that flame inside them.”
Grossman joined the army in 1971; because he had studied Arabic at school, he served in an intelligence unit. Right after the Yom Kippur War, on the eve of the day he was to be transferred to a base in the Sinai, he met a new conscript, Michal Eshel, with whom he immediately fell in love. For their first date, Michal took him to the theater to see a revue of sketches in a Jerusalem cabaret: a political satire that parodied and criticized Israel’s leaders, including the generals, with such caustic flippancy that Grossman was shocked into open-mouthed silence. Afterward he expressed his disapproval to Michal, certain that she felt as he did. Only to discover that, in fact, the content of the sketches matched what she thought. “I was crushed, because I thought I was doomed to love a woman who was so wrong,” he says. Michal, who came from a politically left-wing family, and Grossman spent their first year of life together entangled in fierce ideological quarrels, with Grossman growing angrier and more despairing as his love for her deepened.
At that time, his political views were conventional: Israel, surrounded by enemies, was destined for endless war, and the only imperative was survival. In 1967, the year of his bar mitzvah, Israel had won the Six-Day War and occupied Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. In The Yellow Wind, Grossman speaks of his generation:
“The energy that surged from our adolescent hormones went hand in hand with the intoxication that overtook the entire country”: the conquest, the confident penetration into the enemy’s territory, its total defeat, the breaking of the taboo of borders, the act of walking the narrow streets of once-forbidden cities… In the early days of the occupation, Jewish families took to going to the West Bank or Gaza on weekends, or on tours organized by transport companies like the one his father worked for. They bought keffiyehs for next to nothing and wore them triumphantly through the streets of Hebron and Jericho. The Palestinians were crushed and the Israelis were seduced by what Grossman calls “the temptation of force, the temptation of the arbitrary.” At thirteen, he drew an unmixed satisfaction from Israeli power.
As he grew older, however, it made him uneasy; when friends or army comrades pressed him to join them on an outing in the occupied territories, he would refuse, saying: “They hate us, they don’t want us there. I don’t want to be a thorn in someone else’s side.”
This dawning awareness did not lead him to question his fundamental political opinions. But a year spent with Michal would turn him into a critic of Israel — a dissident patriot, a liberal Zionist. In 1976, after both had left the army, they married, and Grossman enrolled at the Hebrew University. One Friday, as he was cleaning the floor of their apartment on campus, he informed his skeptical wife that, instead of studying literature, he was going to write it.
To be an Israeli writer means making peace with the tyranny of what Israelis call hamatzav, “the situation”: war, occupation, and political turmoil could easily fill everything, novel after novel, and crush the private spaces of domestic life and individual imagination. Grossman, though he respects his role as a journalist, leaves no doubt about what he considers his essential function: “Please don’t forget that I am a novelist,” he told me, “and what interests me above all are the nuances of what happens in the relations between two people, or between a person and himself.” He did not want merely to comment on the Gaza flotilla or the peace talks. One day, as we were discussing journalism, he described a scene from Madame Bovary. Emma and her lover, unable to find any place in town where they can be alone, have no choice but to be driven through the entire city in a closed carriage in which they make love, while all the townspeople know about it. “When you read Flaubert, you are inside, with that couple, and you are seized by all the torments of bigamy and passion, by all its temptations, and you are present and you yourself are wrestling with all those passions. But when you read the newspapers, at least in Israel, you become those townspeople pointing their fingers.”
One aspect of what Oz calls Grossman’s gentleness is a reflex of self-protection. At the most basic level, it means that he speaks only rarely and reluctantly of his son’s death. “I’m in a strange situation,” he says. “I am very private, but because of what happened, my entire life is exposed like an open wound.”
For Grossman, literature has been a refuge from the relentless fury of history. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Grossman, then in the army reserves, was called up barely a month after Jonathan’s birth and spent five weeks on active duty. “I have no hesitation about serving in the army,” he says. “I know where we live.” He took with him a copy of the book by the French Jewish writer Romain Gary, Promise at Dawn. He was garrisoned for a time in a Lebanese village, and every evening he would take off his helmet and flak jacket, climb onto a roof where he was vulnerable to enemy fire, and read a chapter. “It was a way of reminding myself who I was before the war,” he says. “It was to prove to myself that literature can protect. It does not have the power to save a life, as in To the End of the Land. But it protects in the sense that it does not allow the situation to confiscate what matters to me.”
What Grossman saw in Lebanon made permanent the political shift that Michal had begun. Engaged in an unwinnable war, the Israeli army had become arrogant and brutal. To submit to an ideology of belligerence was a form of humiliation that destroyed one’s own humanity. In the years following the Six-Day War, the occupation of Palestinian towns and villages was so smooth and so successful, a kind of joint enterprise between the two peoples, that Israelis were barely conscious of being occupiers. “I could not understand how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by everyone’s account, was capable of training itself to live as a conqueror without its life becoming abominable.” Grossman later wrote in The Yellow Wind: “What has happened to us?” His first novel, The Smile of the Lamb (1983), was an attempt to grasp this question: an Israeli soldier garrisoned in the West Bank, named Uri, befriends an old Arab storyteller, Khilmi, who lives in a cave and whose son is killed by soldiers of Uri’s battalion. The novel revealed a voice that was at once passionate and subtle, eager to explore the field of extreme emotion. But the story was too allegorical to give a convincing answer to what Grossman calls “the sphinx that lies at the door of each of us.”
For his next novel, he turned to the past. He had been obsessed with the Holocaust since childhood, and as he approached thirty it had become an obstacle that threatened to block everything else. He recalls: “I could no longer make sense of my life as an individual, as a man, as a father, as a writer, as a Jew and an Israeli, unless I sat down and wrote about the Shoah.” After The Smile of the Lamb was published, a reader told Grossman that the book had clearly been written under the influence of a Polish Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz, who had been murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Grossman had never read Schulz. He borrowed the complete edition of Schulz’s stories in Hebrew from a friend and read them in a few hours. He felt an intense affinity with the work, which he described in an essay published in The New Yorker last year:
“Reading his work made me realize that, in our daily routine, we feel life only when it slips away: as we grow older, as we lose our physical capacities, our health, and also, all the more so, the members of our family and our closest friends. Then we stop for a moment, we turn inward, and we think: there was something here, and now it no longer exists. And it will never come back. And it may be that we understand it in its truth and its depth only once it is lost. But when you read Schulz, page after page, you have the feeling that words return to their source, to the strongest and most authentic vibration that manifests itself in them — that life is more intense than what weakens with us and inexorably vanishes.”
How Schulz died is not really known. An afterword at the end of the collection recounts one possible version: after a Jewish dentist was murdered by a German officer, who was Schulz’s protector, a German who had been the dentist’s protector killed Schulz, saying: “You killed my Jew, I killed yours.” The story left Grossman utterly devastated. As he recounted in The Paris Review: “I did not want to live in a world where such things can happen, where people are regarded as items that can be replaced or thrown away. I felt that it was my duty to redeem his pointless, brutal death. That is why I wrote See Under: Love.”
The novel, set between Israel and Poland during the war, is divided into four sections, with elements of magical realism and a semblance of linearity. Momik, the nine-year-old son of Holocaust survivors, lives in the shadow of the unspeakable “Nazi beast” that he imagines hiding in the cellar of the house. He grows up to become a poet and, still blocked by his fixation on the Holocaust, takes an imaginary journey into history and rewrites Schulz’s fate so that the writer is saved from death by being turned into a salmon that leaps into the Baltic Sea. Momik also imagines a new version of the story of his own great-uncle, Anshel Wasserman, a writer of Yiddish tales for children and a survivor of Auschwitz. A camp commandant orders Wasserman to write the sequel to a story he had written, titled “The Children of the Heart,” and Wasserman tells it again and again until he becomes a Jewish Scheherazade. See Under: Love is a deeply ambitious, original, and uneven work. Like Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March, it is the work of a young man acutely conscious of his creative powers. It is a narrative act of faith reminiscent of the Romantic poets: the literary act has the power to redeem life, to purge language of corruption, to bring about a new world. At first, Grossman thought no one but Michal would read See Under: Love. In fact the book brought him international recognition, especially in Europe, lifting him into the ranks of the major Israeli novelists. “See Under: Love is an unquestionable breakthrough not only for David but for Israeli literature,” Oz declares. “This work renews the Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century.” Yehoshua was dazzled by the performance of the language: “He created an orchestra I did not know, an orchestra of nuance and language.”
Despite his growing literary fame, Grossman continued to work as a radio journalist, presenting the morning news and hosting a program in Jerusalem. In 1987, the twentieth anniversary of the start of the occupation, the news weekly Koteret Rashit asked him to write a report on living conditions in the West Bank. Since The Smile of the Lamb, he had avoided visiting the Territories, lapsing into a virtuous self-satisfaction: “My sphinx had become a neutered cat purring at my feet,” he writes, “for the worn phrases I used, like so many others, though truthful, expressed something else, like the walls of a prison that I had built around a reality I did not want to see.” A writer for whom language is a means of disturbing a false quietude could only see this assignment as an existential challenge. In the West Bank, Grossman listened to elderly women, students, teachers, refugees, writers. The result of this act of empathy filled an entire issue of Koteret Rashit. Presented as directly and concretely as Grossman’s fiction is discontinuous and personal, the report bore the mark of a writer who had chosen to stand face-to-face with the bitterness and rage directed straight at him. Grossman revealed to Israelis that the occupation, far from stabilizing the situation, was generating implacable hatreds and creating all the conditions for a violent revolt. The impact of this article and of the book that followed it, The Yellow Wind, had no equal in recent Israeli publishing. Many Israelis loathed what they read. Grossman described, among other things, the way Israeli soldiers demolished the homes of suspected opponents. He received threats, and his car was damaged. Even today, more than twenty years on, if you mention Grossman’s name to certain Israelis, you will hear of his perfidy in writing The Yellow Wind. Yet, as Oz says of the book, many Israelis confronted the reality of the occupation for the first time, and in a profound way. The very idea of ending it and allowing the establishment of a Palestinian State, which at the time was a taboo for the Israeli establishment, suddenly became conceivable.
At the end of the report in Koteret Rashit, Grossman wrote: “I am afraid that the present situation will continue without any change for at least ten or twenty years.” Instead, in the few months following the article’s publication, the Palestinians rose up against the occupation, triggering what would come to be called the Intifada, and Grossman’s investigation suddenly looked like a prophecy. The following year, in 1988, the Palestinian leadership announced its intention to create a Palestinian State that would recognize Israel’s right to exist. Grossman wanted to report this development at the top of his morning program, but his editor-in-chief disagreed. The Minister of Security had issued an order not to break the news. The next day, Grossman read in the press that he had been fired. The end of his career at state radio “condemned me to be a writer,” he later said.
The Yellow Wind made Grossman the most prominent figure on the Israeli left. And in the years that followed he wrote many articles on “the situation,” along with Sleeping on a Wire, a similar book based on interviews with Israeli Arabs. He supported the Oslo peace negotiations. He joined a group of Israeli and Palestinian writers who began to meet illegally in European embassies and, from time to time, in one another’s homes. When the teenage son of one of the Palestinian writers was killed by Israeli soldiers, and the army evaded every explanation the father demanded, Grossman and two Israeli writers pressed the Supreme Court to order an investigation. (“The army carried out an investigation and reported its conclusions to the father,” Grossman attests.)
But at that same time, Grossman was removing politics from his imaginary world. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he wrote light novels about teenagers — The Zigzag Kid and Someone to Run With — an epistolary novel about an adulterous affair that never actually took place, Be My Knife, and a few short stories published under the title I’m Listening with My Body. He was the father of three children now, and being a parent released new literary energies in him: “It was a real rebirth, when suddenly I was able to explore life through my children’s eyes and to understand so much about them, about myself, including the relationships I had with my own parents,” he says; “it was a different way of belonging to the world.” Following a translation, See Under: Love became an enormous success in Italy; he began making frequent trips there to promote the book. One evening, on the eve of yet another departure, during dinner, Uri, who was then three, asked his father: “Do you have another little boy in Italy?” It shook Grossman, who realized Uri’s state of mind. “Just imagine the hell it must have been before he could put that question into words, because, for him, what was this magnet that could pull me over there and draw me away from him?” Whenever he left, he recorded cassettes for his children with stories and music, so they could hear his voice while he was away.
There was another reason for this turning inward: the repetition and corruption of words had ended up draining political language of its vitality. “For years I felt it was impossible to write about ‘the situation,’” Grossman says. “Every party in the political sphere has already used and abused every word. I felt that in my writing, every time I used a word that belonged to ‘the situation,’ it was already worn out and rang like a cliché. And I thought I would not write about it again unless I found the right language, the right musicality.” Critics judged this a decline from his output of the eighties. One day, at the University of Haifa, during a discussion of two of Grossman’s stories whose subject was erotic obsession and the boundary between memory and imagination, Yehoshua turned to him and said: “David, don’t leave me alone in the battle!” Yet Grossman was determined to make, in his work, a clear separation between what belonged to his imagination and what belonged to current events. In his novels, the vein of the imaginary that irrigated the most evocative pages also had a sentimental side; it gave him a way of avoiding what a realist author would have placed at the center of his work: political despair. “I felt I was missing something important, because through literary writing I understand much better what is happening in the reality around me than by writing articles.”
In the late 1990s, Grossman’s political approach reached the peak of its influence, only to collapse afterward. The implications of his dispatches about the news in the West Bank gradually shaped Israeli government policy during the negotiations with the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. The occupation was indefensible; it was a threat to Israel’s security and to its moral image: there should be two States side by side. But from the year 2000 on, with the second Intifada and the tragic proliferation of suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, immediately followed by violent Israeli reprisals, the search for a solution reached an impasse. The journalist Ari Shavit told me that Grossman, in his longing for peace, had been unable to perceive the consequences of the Palestinians’ implacable bitterness — the very bitterness he had evoked so acutely in The Yellow Wind. “The political school to which Grossman belonged was unable to clearly grasp the political implications of its own conclusions,” Shavit told me; “his version of peace was refuted.”
Grossman stopped seeing his Palestinian friends because it was becoming too dangerous, and their phone conversations grew sadder and less frequent. The most direct contact with “the situation” — the visits of his son Jonathan, when he was on leave — only confirmed the ever-deepening cracks in the foundations of his country. Grossman told me: “Israeli families don’t want to know what their sons are doing over there in the army. It’s unbearable. How can you bring up, in the very midst of the sweetness of life, the tenderness of family life — how can you bring up the atrocities of the occupation, the way the occupied population is treated, the humiliation inflicted on it? There is this silence, as if both sides had agreed not to ask questions, not to tell what happens. It is, on a larger scale, our inability as a State to master the problem of the occupation. We cannot reconcile it with the image we have of ourselves.”
To choose apathy or false security as an escape was as intolerable to him as terror is to most people. The violence of the early 2000s, just as his sons were joining the army, gave a new meaning to the danger, both political and personal, and in 2003 Grossman adopted the only strategy he knew for avoiding paralysis by this fear: writing a novel. The book would blend two spheres: the first would be “the situation,” with its existential fear; the second, the life of an Israeli family, which he described as “a very domestic epic story.” “It tells of three wars, the conflict, the occupation, and everything that goes with it. But what really interests me, in fact, are the nuances of what happens within the family. That’s where my real libido lies.”
At the heart of To the End of the Land is Grossman’s greatest fictional creation, the character of Ora: tender, passionate, quick to anger, funny, self-doubting, intuitive, and above all “generous.” The novel evokes the convolutions, the reversals, and the surges of her consciousness, moving forward or backward by turns, without the thread ever slackening. Ora is a middle-aged woman whose husband, Ilan, has recently left her. She is the mother of two sons, Adam and Ofer. Ilan is gone, Adam has grown up, and Ofer, about to be discharged, has suddenly vanished following an emergency call-up. Ora is alone in their Jerusalem home, tormenting herself over Ofer. She realizes that, for a message to be delivered, it must first be received, and she decides not to play her part; she will not collaborate with the State. “And then something else gradually occurs to her,” Grossman writes: “if they don’t find her, if they can’t find her, he won’t be harmed.”
Ora contacts a former lover who has chosen to live as a recluse, and she enlists him to accompany her on a hike along the Israel National Trail. Grossman calls his novel “a walkie-talkie book,” because for four hundred pages his characters walk and talk — or, rather, it is mostly Ora who talks and Avram who listens, her words leading to the evocation of past events drawn at random. Her story, which emerges little by little and without any chronology, encompasses both the full complexity of an entire life and the broader history of Israel’s contemporary conflicts. Ora stands to one side of Israel’s wars, taking the measure of everything they cost. “I have always felt that women are more skeptical toward men’s games, such as government, the army, war, even religion,” Grossman says. “I always think of the sacrifice in the Bible. If God had come to Sarah and said, ‘Give me your son, your only son, your beloved son, Isaac,’ she would have answered, ‘Leave me alone,’ not to say ‘Get lost.’ She would not have collaborated with him, no chance. Abraham, for his part, collaborated immediately. He obeyed, he asked no questions.”
To the End of the Land is not an apolitical novel; it is an antipolitical one, an act of protest against history and its continual incursions into the “sweetness of life.” At the same time, Ora, having fled Jerusalem, realizes that she cannot escape her own existence. She says: “It’s my country, and I really have nowhere else to go. Where would I go? Tell me where I could go and be angry about everything, and in any case, who would want me? But at the same time, I know this country really has no chance of pulling through, really none.”
Ora’s endless ruminations, her anger and her weariness at the wars, her love for her land and her family, her awareness of the fluctuations of life — all allow her creator to convey the full scale, to give a complete sense, of Israel’s tragedy: a country that can take nothing for granted, not even its own existence.
For Israelis, the novel resonated far more deeply than the political realm alone. In a single day, one of Israel’s most left-wing figures, the journalist Gideon Levy, and one of the country’s most right-wing, the politician Effi Eitam, both told Grossman: “This is my book.” For Grossman, this meant that he had put his readers “in touch with the roots of the situation.”
Grossman’s most Israeli novel is also his most universal. Amos Oz, who read it “as though electrified,” says of it: “There was no border between the Israeli condition and the human condition. I think that is the very essence of great literature: the more it concerns us as Israelis, the more universal it is.” Yehoshua, for his part, read it as a return to “the situation” — not the conflict itself, but the way “a state of permanent war weighs on the smallest particle of our lives.” For Alon Hilu, a leading novelist of the generation after Grossman’s: “It is the major book of the past decade in Israeli literature, because it is about Israel but in an absolutely personal way, in Grossman’s way.”
Israelis are readers, and To the End of the Land sold more than a hundred thousand copies in a country of seven million inhabitants. In July, there was a large gathering, in Independence Park in Jerusalem, in honor of Gilad Shalit1, the Israeli corporal held hostage by Hamas for four years. Thousands came with yellow ribbons tied to their wrists and to their dogs’ collars, to hear Shalit’s parents urge the government to negotiate his release, arguing that any Israeli soldier who had not returned from combat was the responsibility of all Israelis. Shalit had been captured just before the Second Lebanon War, less than two months before the death of Uri Grossman, and although David Grossman did not attend the gathering, the fates of the two young men, the two most famous conscript soldiers in Israel’s recent history, were forever linked. “During the demonstration, I approached four women, unrelated to one another, who seemed to be Ora’s age, and I asked them what they thought of the novel. Each had a different opinion, but all had read it.”
Before the novel was published in Israel, when Grossman, like any writer, was anxious about the reviews, Yehoshua visited him in his office and told him: “Don’t worry, you are protected.” Grossman did not appreciate it at all. He wanted his book judged on its literary merits, and Yehoshua later regretted what he had said (“it wasn’t very kind,” he admitted to me), but it was true.
Several Israelis said they thought the book’s reception in Israel (where expectations had been set extremely high, partly because Grossman’s life and the novel’s story converged) was at times a little less than sincere, because influenced by the general sympathy toward its author. Some readers found the novel too long and could not finish it. Others said that the theme of parental anguish over a child in the army was so familiar in Israel that it had become self-evident — a less likely reaction among Americans. A sense of disappointment was inevitable on the part of some Israelis. Grossman can no longer be a mere novelist. The left-wing writer whose son fell in combat has become a secular prophet.
On the night of November 4, 2006 — just three months after Uri’s death, and at the end of a botched war — Grossman was the keynote speaker at a memorial ceremony marking the eleventh anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; a hundred thousand people filled the Tel Aviv square where the murder had taken place. In a soft but rhythmic and resonant voice, he presented himself “as someone whose love for his country is extreme, complex, and yet unequivocal; and as someone whose lasting covenant with his land has turned personal misfortune into a pact sealed in blood.” He then indicted Israel’s leaders and handed down a heavy sentence:
“For many years, the State of Israel has sacrificed not only the lives of its children but also that unique, miraculous chance that history had granted it — the possibility of founding here a viable, democratic State faithful to Jewish and universal values. […] Look at what has happened to us; look at what has happened to this young, brave, passionate country that was ours, and how Israel, as though it had undergone a process of accelerated aging, leaped in a single bound from childhood and youth to a perpetual state of complaint, weakness, and frustration. Israel’s political and military leaders are hollow. Look at their distrustful conduct, petrified and sweating with fear. It is vain to expect them to speak a language of wisdom.”
Grossman had refused any meeting with Ehud Olmert, who was responsible for the needless extension of the war that had cost Uri his life; he had refused to receive his condolences. In 2007, when Grossman was awarded one of Israel’s most prestigious prizes, he refused to shake Olmert’s hand on the platform. But at the end of the Tel Aviv speech, he addressed Olmert directly to urge him to speak to the Palestinians over the heads of their leaders, to tell them that he recognized their suffering. “Nothing would be taken from you, nor from Israel’s authority in future negotiations. But our hearts may open a little to one another, and that represents an immense power.”
Grossman’s words made headlines for several days. “If there was ever an Israeli Martin Luther King, it was Grossman that day,” says Ari Shavit. “He was a mature, moral figure, a tragic figure facing a nation that had lost all confidence in its leaders. The grandeur of his words and the nobility of his bearing before the nation and before his own destiny represented the only moment in years when this nation rose to something moral and spiritual, when we all stood together to contemplate the tragedy of our existence. It was truly a great moment.”
In his speech, as in his articles and his books, Grossman used the language of a man who belongs to Israel. The words are harsh, but they are spoken by someone who is an integral part of this nation, a member of the family to whom his personal grief lends a special status even among people who disagree with him vehemently.
The political scientist Shlomo Avineri said of Grossman: “He has become morally beyond all criticism; mourning is sacred in our country.”
Although his moral position is unassailable, his political position is increasingly rejected. The failure of the peace process after 2000 was a disaster for the Israeli left. The two left-wing parties, Labor and Meretz, hold only sixteen of the Knesset’s hundred and twenty seats. The two-State solution is now the government’s official policy, even under the right-wing rule of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but the public has less confidence in it, and less interest in the subject, than at any time since the publication of The Yellow Wind. Yehoshua described this contradiction as “a chocolate-coated nut”: a moderate official position and a hardening public opinion. “I told David yesterday: people feel guilty toward the Arabs, and so they hate them.”
Yossi Klein Halevi, an intellectual at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a rather left-leaning institute, says that Grossman’s views carry more influence abroad than in Israel. “He is morally respected,” he says, “but when Grossman speaks about the peace process, he has very little credibility, because he has never reckoned with the failure of his position after 2000.”
Halevi compares Grossman’s “desperate naïveté” — his belief that there can be no path to peace unless Israel changes its policy — to Ora’s magical thinking, and also to the famous words of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism: “If you will it, it is no dream.”
Since 2006, some Israelis have taken to calling Grossman “the conscience of the country.” He does not like the term. He does not want to turn Uri’s death into moral authority. He still holds the political views he held when Uri was alive. Even though Arab fighters killed his son, he continues to support the rights of the Palestinians. Even though he has detached himself from Israel’s leaders, he still sends his children to the army. “When someone says to me, ‘I can’t argue with you because you’re a bereaved father,’ I answer: that’s foolish… argue with me, but not with my emotions.”
There is a Hebrew expression, yafeh nefesh, which means “beautiful soul” but carries an ironic connotation, and which is often applied to Grossman. “I regard it as a decoration,” he says. “A certain naïveté is needed to go on believing in the possibility of changing things, and even to go on believing in humanity.” Unlike many privileged Israelis who reassure themselves with passports from other countries and send their children abroad, Grossman gives himself no such way out. Like Ora, he can live nowhere else. What he wants is for Jews to feel at home in Israel — a feeling that force and conquest have been unable to give them.
Over the past ten years, Grossman’s contacts with the occupied territories have dwindled, which has only deepened his political isolation. But in Ramallah there is a Palestinian professor and writer named Ahmad Harb, whom Grossman first met during his forbidden contacts in the early 1990s. They have remained friends despite being unable to see each other: “We are like two groups of miners digging a tunnel through the mountain from either side,” Grossman says. “We want to hope that the other side is doing its part within its society as I do my part within mine; and I wish that we could meet.”
I visited Harb, a somewhat formal man in his late fifties, at his home in Ramallah. His living room looked out onto a hillside covered with Palestinian buildings under construction. In early 2000, Israeli troops besieged the town, and Grossman often phoned him to make sure he was all right. Harb did the same after Uri’s death. Harb had planned to write a book on the works of David Grossman, but the political situation in the West Bank was not good, and it might have caused some problems.
“Yesterday, I spoke with David about the possibility of translating one of my novels into Hebrew,” Harb told me. He said: “Honestly, there isn’t much interest in translating Palestinian literature. And if a Palestinian set about translating or teaching Israeli literature, he would be regarded as a kind of collaborator.” “There’s no reason for that,” Harb went on, “although they are enemies, the two peoples should know each other and read each other’s work.” But for now, everything they tried to build twenty years ago has been destroyed. In a better world, he and David would have been close friends. “I hope later, in the future,” he said, “but it’s like a ghost. You tell yourself, I’m about to reach it, but then something can blow everything else up. And you’re back to square one.”
As I was leaving, Harb gave me a translation of his new novel, Remains, to carry the ten kilometers separating Ramallah from Grossman’s house in Mevasseret Zion.
Every Friday afternoon at four o’clock, the Grossmans join several hundred Israelis at a traffic circle in a hilly, sparsely built suburb east of Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah.
Grossman’s grandparents lived there before the War of Independence in 1948. During the population transfers that followed, they moved to West Jerusalem, and Palestinians settled in their place. Not long ago, Jews began claiming Arab houses in the area, and Sheikh Jarrah became the epicenter of battles over the establishment of settlements in Jerusalem. Grossman has been the leader of small weekly demonstrations against the settlers, held for over a year.
On a sunny Friday in July, Grossman and Michal stood in the middle of the crowd while two dozen police placed barriers at the top of a street. Down the hill, a family of settlers had moved into a two-story building and conspicuously erected an oversized menorah in orange-colored metal. Across the street, the Palestinian family that had been evicted had set up an encampment under a fig tree. People chanted: “Arabs and Jews do not want to be enemies,” and two protesters unfurled a banner reading, in Arabic and English: “Stop the ethnic cleansing.” From time to time a settler’s car forced its way through the crowd. One day it happened that a driver got out of his car and exchanged angry words with the demonstrators. The tension was high. The protesters, mostly younger and more radical than Grossman, wanted to cross the police barrier and go fifty meters down to protest right in front of the house. With each attempt, the police formed a cordon and pushed them back hard, striking some of the demonstrators with batons and arresting the loudest. The anger on both sides only grew. Grossman, wearing a green baseball cap and a black-and-white striped polo, kept his calm and stayed at the center of the action without pushing or retreating.
“The essential thing for us is to make it clear that we too are here; you are not alone here,” he said during a lull. “What’s depressing is that we’ve been demonstrating for so many years. If an updated version of The Yellow Wind were to be published,” he added, “most people would not read it today. They’ve had enough.”
“They don’t care,” said Zehava Galon, a friend of Grossman’s who was a Meretz member of the Knesset. “There are about three hundred people here, but most people in Israel don’t care at all about the Palestinians.”
Grossman and the tall, dark-skinned policeman on duty spoke to each other with respect and came to an agreement: a small group of demonstrators, young and old, would be allowed to cross the barricade. But a young activist rejected the plan: it had to be all or none. They went back to pushing. The police charged, and in the scuffle Grossman was struck on the arm by the flat of a policeman’s hand. The blow was not deliberate, but that very evening the Israeli press reported that a famous writer had been assaulted by a frenzied policeman. The demonstrators withdrew to the traffic circle and the demonstration began to disperse. The Grossmans talked with the Meretz activist and other friends who had come out at an hour when most Israelis are home preparing for Shabbat. A young man stepped forward to ask a question. He wanted to know whether the word lasud (“to make secret”), used as a verb in To the End of the Land, exists in Hebrew in that form. Grossman smiled, as if this were the conversation he had been waiting for all afternoon, and said: “I invented it.”
Throughout the past year, Grossman has been working on a new project, one that combines both a narrative prose piece the length of a novella and a piece of “opera” whose libretto is written in verse. He calls this hybrid work “a creature” and does not describe it further, except to say that it has to do with “a new reality” with which he is now increasingly familiar — the proximity of life and death, and the question of how to include death within life. To his surprise, the language of death comes to him more easily in poetic language, and it has a kind of musicality. Every morning, in the room he rents, he forces himself down to the deepest, most difficult level where he can be with the dead. He tells himself: “My fate has condemned me to live in this desert land; I am going to map it.” Grossman has found that grief — like childhood, like marriage, like military occupation — is not monolithic. It varies, and experiencing each variation carries him closer to his loss. Though he is exploring a desolate plateau, the clouds cast new shadows every day.
We discussed the project one morning, in the hills of Galilee. I joined Grossman at an inn near the Lebanese border, where he and his family had gone for a short vacation before Jonathan’s wedding and Ruthi’s army induction. Grossman and I went out to walk around Mount Meron, the highest peak in Israel; for nearly an hour in the midday heat, we followed the trail he had taken in 2004, overlooking a vineyard growing on the slopes below; climbing toward the summit, you pass the white buildings of an intelligence base. Lebanon stretched out below us, in the haze, eight kilometers away. During the 2006 war, some of the mountain’s trees had burned from the impact of Katyusha rockets. Along the path, the vegetation — terebinth and wild hawthorn — was withered and stunted.
We passed an Orthodox family: young parents out walking with two children and a baby. Grossman stopped and exchanged pleasantries with them. (They did not recognize him.) And he told me afterward that they came from some of the most militant settlements in Israel. “In another context, the walk might have degenerated into a perhaps fierce argument,” he remarked, “but here, outside, in nature, one is able to be pleasant and open.” At a lookout point from which one could see Lebanese hills and farms, a plaque was fixed to a railing. Grossman translated: “Restored by the family and friends of First Lieutenant Uriel Peretz, of blessed memory, born in Ofira on the second day of Kislev, 5737 (1977), fallen in Lebanon on the 7th day of Kislev, 5758 (1998). Scout, soldier, faithful to the Torah and to his country.” Then, after a moment, Grossman added: “You see a lot of them; many families do it.” The plaque appears in To the End of the Land, when Ora and Avram climb Mount Meron in the middle of the novel. It is there that Ora says to Avram: “Isn’t it true of Israel, that every encounter with this country is like a farewell?”
We stopped to rest in the shade of low, twisted trees that had grown diagonally along the ground. A yellow butterfly fluttered in the warm air. The place was haunted and silent, like the woods of a fairy tale. It occurred to me that we were, within Israel’s borders, as close as one could be to the spot where Grossman’s son had fallen. “We’re alone here, it’s surprising,” Grossman said. “In Israel, being alone even in your own head is almost impossible.” For a moment I felt I was intruding, being there with him.
I asked him why he had wanted to walk that trail alone in 2004. “I like to do things that frighten me,” he said; “when I’m afraid, I understand more. I want to feel that sensation.” He began to laugh: “Even in what I’m writing now, my whole instinct rebels against it, every day that dawns.” So I tell myself: “I have to do it; if I don’t do it, no one will do it for me. It plays such a role in my life now, the grief. It is hard to say the word. The separation from Uri, learning to accept what happened. I have to face it. It is even my responsibility as a father toward him. I cannot escape it.”
By kind permission of The New Yorker and George Packer (Translated by Catherine Gaudin and Anny Dayan Rosenman)
Notes
Editor’s note: the New Yorker article dates from September 27, 2010.↩︎