Books Full of Hands

He is a secular Jew with a great intellectual openness. His characters are ordinary people whom life pushes to rewrite their reality. David Grossman, one of Israel’s leading writers, is also an editorialist for newspapers in England, the United States, and Italy for the daily newspaper la Repubblica

You asked me, Luca, why I write about children and for children. I believe every writer does. Rilke used to say that children are the great archive of our memory, and I agree with him. However, there is something else: I am fascinated by children because there is something luminous and transparent in their existence.”

David Grossman tries to explain it by telling about his oldest son. “I remember that one evening I put him to bed; he was three years old at the time. It was December 21st, and I said to him, “You know, this is the longest night of the year.” Then I tucked him in and said good night. At dawn he came running into our bedroom, all sweaty and excited, “Mama, mama, it’s over!” Seeing that this was the longest night, he did not at all take it for granted that the sun would come up the next morning. We are all like frozen children; we have forgotten what this means. When I talk about children, I hope I am able to describe this: a life in which nothing is taken for granted. For a child, every moment is a discovery.”

David Grossman is like this, a man who has the talent to identify with another, to understand and imagine the other’s world as though he were seeing it with his own eyes. All his writing has this force of rebuilding the world, of imagining it as different, not by an effort of the imagination as an end in itself, but in order to rediscover its deepest nature, which usually remains veiled by the categories we use for looking. Grossman’s characters are ordinary people, of our own time, that some strange occasion of life unexpectedly pushes to “rewrite” their own reality, discovering that it is greater. Luca Doninelli explained this very well in his introduction to the meeting organized by the Cultural Center of Milan on Tuesday, October 21st, in the San Marco room, crowded with people listening in rapt silence to him and Gad Lerner present the Italian translation of Grossman’s book, Baguf ani mevina (published in English as In Another Life).

Doninelli called it “an encounter,” an unexpected one, for him first of all, who by profession is used to reading books and had never paid very much attention to Grossman–until the day when he picked up Death as a Way of Life, a collection of journalistic pieces. “I was struck by the intellectual openness of this writer; I was struck by the quantitative scarcity of the prejudices in his way of narrating,” Doninelli says. This is what enabled Grossman to write, concerning the Pope’s visit to Israel, that he had breathed for a week “the breath of a different spirit, a spirit of reconciliation and of a life free from hatred and the exhausting need always to be enemies. For this small miracle, I, a secular Jew, say, ‘Thank you, John Paul II.’” Even the most disenchanted spectator, Grossman went on to write, “who does not want and cannot find comfort in any faith, remains impressed by the strength of this religious feeling, and regrets that it has been lost over the centuries.”

Doninelli has read his literary work in depth, and Grossman realized this. Doninelli says that Grossman’s greatness can be perceived from the fact that in his pages, “what is probably literature’s great ambition is achieved, that of keeping us company. David was a bit frightened before when I told him, preparing this meeting, that the great theme of this phase of his work is the ‘you.’ The great poet Paul Célan said that poetry and literature are like a handshake, like one hand held out to shake another. Grossman’s books are full of hands. In the last analysis, this is literature: a matter of hands, of touching each other, of embracing each other, of holding each other close, of delivering one’s soul to the other, without prejudice as much as possible, letting another embrace you. Grossman never stands firm on his status as a writer, but always shows that he believes in the possibility literature affords to put people in communication–to the point of physically touching each other.”

Célan’s statement is also a good photograph of the evening. The first word Grossman said was “shalom,” peace. Everyday life is where we have to “demilitarize ourselves,” he said. We have to drop the defenses that sustain, but also confine our lives. We have to surrender “to someone who represents another possibility of me, but is not me.” We have to open ourselves up to the risk of encounter, so that things may find their depth again. “When we throw away our defense mechanisms, we suddenly see how marvelous it is to belong to others.”

Lerner described David Grossman as a civilian author, who defends his people by watching over their language. “Frankly,” he said, “I do not believe that writers understand politics better than carpenters, belly dancers, or taxi drivers do.” But he admits that walls are erected and knocked down using, above all, words–for better or for worse. “When a country starts going against its values and its laws, against its deepest image, the first victim is the language: the army, politics, the media start manipulating people using false words, in such a way that no one knows any more what the atrocity in which they are involved means. Then, the writers can stand up and say, “Wait a minute, that word is wrong.” When a mass bombing of the civilian population of Gaza is called “environmental damage,” the writer can say, “Look, here we are not talking about ecology, but about innocent people killed.”

Grossman says that for 55 years, Israel has lived to survive, because it is always under threat from someone who wants to destroy it, not only to defeat it or shrink its borders, but to erase it from the face of the earth. And yet, surviving is not enough. “There is always a human being in front of us. You can even hate him, and believe me, when I hear on the TV news of entire families disappearing in a second, it happens.” But it is not possible to live like this. “It would be like sentencing ourselves to a capital execution, to this vendetta that runs around in a circle and doesn’t get us anywhere. We have to be very cool when we think. I dream of a day when Jews and Palestinians will sit in front of each other and will apologize to each other for everything we have done. Asking forgiveness is not a gesture that weakens us; rather, it would enable us to regain our dignity. I write because I need to find again these qualities that seem paralyzed in us, after so many years of living on the margins of what we really are.”

At the end, Lerner made some attempt at provocation, bringing up the idea of a common Judeo-Christian heritage. The fact that Christians acknowledge their roots is fine, he said, but the hyphen between Judeo and Christian cannot be read in the opposite direction: Jews do not recognize themselves in Christian culture. This is true, of course. It is like saying that they do not accept the New Testament; the catechism is enough for understanding that. And yet, an evening like this one says something more, which Lerner perhaps did not pick up, or did pick up and does not want to confirm. If Rabbi Michael Shevack from New York dared to say to Fr Giussani–without, by this, giving up his own faith–that “you and your friends are the new Israel,” if Giussani himself in August 2002 said to Renato Farina who was interviewing him, “I think that unless the end of the world comes first, sixty or seventy years from now Jews and Christians can be one,” it is perhaps no longer a question of being on the defensive. What is at stake is not just the preamble to the European constitution, or the defense of one’s own culture. The encounter with David Grossman, in the final analysis, demonstrates this.