Grossman: Intimate life in Israel is being confiscated because of extreme situation
Photo: Zoom 77
Grossman: Borders will define identity
Israeli novelist and political writer David Grossman talks about Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his new novel, "In Another Life"
David Grossman,
born 1954 in Jerusalem, is one of the most well known and acclaimed Israeli political essayists and novelists.
As in his latest novels, Grossman's new book "In Another Life" ("Lovers and Strangers " in Great Britain), does not touch on the harsh everyday reality of Israel, but rather deals with the haunting intimate problems of common, everyday people. Hardly anything in the book reminds the reader that the two stories in the book take place in the Jewish state.
I meet David Grossman on a cold and cloudy day in Jerusalem, on the terrace of the YMCA café. Though I want to discuss literature, I cannot refrain from asking Grossman some questions on the actual political situation first, as he is, after all, one of the most thoughtful and outspoken intellectuals in Israel.
Mr. Grossman, do you think the chances for a Israeli-Palestinian understanding are somehow better, now that Arafat is dead?
It is all difficult to predict. There are some possibilities of course, but the scenario which I am afraid is more likely to happen is rather complicated.
First, I am afraid we are not going to witness a time of stability in the Palestinian Authority. If we see stability, if we have one authorized leader there, I am afraid that before he will be able to seriously negotiate with Israel, he will have to prove to his people that he is more Arafat than Arafat, which makes dialogue even more difficult.
Are the Palestinians emotionally ready to accept the notion of a Jewish state beside a Palestinian state?
It is difficult to believe. I do not expect them to love this idea. I think there will be a time that the majority among the Palestinians will realize that the existence of Israel, the Jewish state, is an accomplished fact. They will not love it, but they will have to work with it. They will have to collaborate with this idea for their own interest.
It was very difficult for Israel - most Israelis - to accept the fact that there will be a Palestinian independent state. Now, this idea has infiltrated even to the stubborn mind of Ariel Sharon. He accepted this idea.
Books and Politics
By Christian Buckard
In exclusive interview, renowned writer Amos Oz talks about autobiographical novel, love, tragedy, the Zionist ethos, Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Palestinians can gain a lot from a peace situation between us and them. Their society is ruined; they have lived for two or three generations in violence. When you live in violence, even for a right cause, it corrupts you. You start to think in terms of violence. You start to regard power as a value, vigor as a value. There are many things they have to recover from, as do we, in Israel.
How does the situation in Israel affect the minds, the lives of the people here?
We live in violence. The violence has infiltrated into our internal organs; we are much more violent now in every sense - in the way we drive, talk to each other, raise our children.
You cannot make a split of how you behave toward the enemy for so many years and how you behave in your own home. It infiltrates.
After so many years, for many Israelis, Israel is not a real home, in the sense that it is not what it could be. It does not give us the guarantee of security. We feel persecuted also here; we feel that we do not live the life we want to live and the life we deserve to live. And this is a pity.
For 57 years we have not had fixed borders. If you do not have fixed borders, it is like living in a house where the walls are moving all the time. If you do not know where you end and where the other starts, how can you create an identity?
How can you know who you are? And if there are no fixed borders, there is always this temptation to violate the borders of the other and to fear to be violated by the other; and in a way this is a duplication of the great disease of the Jew in the Diaspora - that there were never real borders or definitions between him and the nations and the countries that hosted the Jews.
So many tragedies have befallen on us because of this abnormality. We need a definition. In Hebrew, you say for definition, “hagdara,”and in hagdarah you hear the word “gader,” fence. We need to have a fence. And I want to have a fence. I do not want to have a wall, like it is built now between us and the Palestinians. I want to have a clear border that would be agreed mutually between us and them together. I want both of us to define where the border will cross, so that both of us will be satisfied, or will be the least unsatisfied in a settlement that we shall do.
When reading your new book, one cannot help but think that the people in Israel have not only these private and universal problems, but on top of it all the pressure of this extreme situation.
Yes, we live an an extreme situation. Everything becomes more extreme: the intensity of life, the feeling of how short life is. On the other hand, I felt that because of the violence and the tension, so much of our intimate life is being confiscated.
And though one has to do the political job, to fight for his cause, to write and to demonstrate, you must not forget the really important things of life.
All the nuances of emotions and little moments. What does it mean to be human, even in this horrible situation, and to raise children, and to laugh?
I wrote my new book in the second and third year of the intifada, when it was very difficult to turn your back on reality, even for an hour. I had to remind myself that these persons in my book deserve their intimacy in the middle of this horrible situation that uglifies and pollutes everything.
Israel always wanted to be a normal state. Do you think that writing these very private books will help bring more normalcy to Hebrew literature?
It is not even a matter of choice. I wanted to write this kind of book now. But you are right: I think that there is such a burden of history and a poisoning reality sometimes. And I am disgusted by the feeling that everything an Israeli writer writes becomes immediately a political analogy or a metaphor for the political situation.
Even Israelis have the right to be jealous, to be nasty and to love each other. One cannot deprive us of these things. Just now I started a novel that takes place more in the outer reality. It took me several years to be able to write about it, because you have to digest it first. You have to understand all the nuances, all the implications of living in such a catastrophic zone.
In the two stories of your new book, you describe how people can change if they start telling stories and listen to other peoples' stories.
We are so afraid of the real story of the other. Sometimes I feel that there is almost an instinct which protects us from the real chaos that prevails inside the other. We do not really want to be exposed totally to the hell in the other. And we are very sophisticated in the ways we protect ourselves, in the way we pretend that we really feel empathy, that we really share the anguish and the suffering.
What happens in the two stories is that the people who listen suddenly decide not to judge and not be threatened by it. It is something so rare. We don’t know what it really means to be another human being; we don’t know it.
Is it a coincidence that the strong characters in this book are women?
No. I think in all my books the women are the stronger ones. From my limited experience I would say that women are more in contact with different layers of the world. Of course, it’s a horrible generalization, but the ones who really taught me things, who really opened me up, who really developed in me abilities to feel more, know more, not to be afraid of inner contradictions, are women. This is what I think; this is how I write.
Could it be that most of your readers are women?
Well, I think every writer knows that most of his or her readers are women. It is just like that. The most frequent phrase that I hear from men, is “Well, you know, my wife is in bed with you now; she reads you.” Everybody is sure that he invented this joke. Men read less than women, it’s a fact. And this is, I think , why we see more and more women writers now. It is only natural that they will be the ones who would answer to the needs of most of the readers.
Do women write differently?
I have heard so many opinions about this. When a women writes a certain character, she must be this character totally. And when a male writer writes truly he is not only man, he should be both. And when a female writer writes, she should be both. This is the only way to write. And, by the way, this is part of the pleasure of writing, because this is the chance to be someone totally different from you. This is the chance to be someone else, and even to make your living on it. What’s better?
This would be the same case for the male readers.
Hopefully. You know, the best reaction that I can get is when people say, “You wrote me. This is me, how could you know? How could you know that I felt this way? That me and my mother, we are in that situation?”
That is the pleasure of reading, that suddenly we read something from totally foreign writers, someone we never met, who comes from a totally different country or continent, and suddenly we feel that we are not alone. That there is another person who understands.
So, reading and writing means to overcome the isolation of the individual?
Definitely. After all, we are alone, but there is this rare moment that the interiority of another human being touches you. It is great. You know, when we are making love, we want to believe that we are totally assimilating with the other, and that we know the other totally. We even say, “To know a women,”(“ la da’at isha”). But it’s a self deceit, because when we make love we are more tuned to the sweet and attractive elements of our partner. But when you write or read a story about another human being, you come in contact with all the different parts of this personality.
There are other things to writing and reading, but one of the most important things is that you do not feel totally alone.
