David Grossman: Human stories to dissolve fossilised narratives

Ahead of an event at Melbourne Jewish Book Week, the leading Israeli novelist talks to Eetta Prince-Gibson about politics, grief and his new novel, More Than I Love My Life

LIKE MANY of David Grossman's novels, his most recent is a story within a story, told in circles that are at times concentric, but then suddenly overlap or collide.

More Than I Love My Life is the story of Vera Novak a partisan fighter from Yugoslavia. Her first husband, Milosz, was a WWII hero; a fellow-partisan against the dictatorship of President Tito; her soul mate; and the father of Nina, their only child.

After Milosz committed suicide during interrogation by the feared secret police, Vera was imprisoned for almost three years on Goli Otok, a desolate Gulag island, where she suffered almost indescribable tortures (although Grossman's terse prose describes them viscerally).

Released from prison, Vera eventually comes to live on a kibbutz in Israel with enigmatic and deeply troubled Nina. She remarries and becomes the meticulously dressed matriarch of the unnamed kibbutz.

By the time we meet her in the novel, she has been widowed again. We discover that she has raised Gilli, Nina's daughter, after Nina abandoned Gilli when she was only a toddler. The entire extended family has come together to celebrate Vera’s 90^th birthday and they decide to travel to Goli Otok, where the family's tragedies began.

Grossman, 68, writer of fiction, nonfiction, and children's books, is a lauded Israeli novelist. He has won Israel's most-prestigious civilian award, the Israel Prize for Literature, as well as international awards, including the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

In an extended interview with The Jewish Independent in anticipation of his participation in Melbourne Jewish Book Week next week, he talked about More than I Love My Life, his role in Israeli society as an author, his political positions, and the loss of his son, Uri, in the Second Lebanon War in 2006.

Grossman speaks softly, always clearly and incisively, yet at times he is wry and even abrupt. His smile is welcoming and kind, often almost bashful or child-like.

Noting that More Than I love My Life is filled with spoilers and turns-of-plot, he describes the novel as "about three strong, opinionated women, a daughter, mother, and grandmother, and the secret that torments the family for three generations. It's a book about love, but a total hermetic love that changed the lives of others. And when the secret is revealed, as most secrets inevitably are, it becomes the story of the ability of family members to remember, forgive and regain love across the generations."

Unlike most of Grossman's writing, this story is based on a real person, Eva Panić Nahir, whose life was dramatised in a television series produced by Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš in 1989, a 2002 Israeli documentary film called Eva, and a profile in Ha’aretz published in 2003.

"More than 20 years ago Panic Nahir got to me the way things are done in Israel -- she just called me because she had something to say about an article I wrote," he recalls. "I was fascinated by her accent, a whole soup mixture of Hungarian and Croatian and Serbian and Hebrew. I was curious and she was very happy to tell me about herself."

But, "like Scheherazade," Grossman says, "when Vera reached a fragile moment in the story, she stopped and said 'but you are probably tired of hearing my small irrelevant story.  Let's say shalom now, and I will call you some time in the future.'  That future came three or four days later, when she called again."

It was clear to Grossman that she wanted him to write her story, but he warned her, "I am not a documentary writer. I will not describe you as you are, I must invent you – and she agreed."

But it took him years, and he is sorry that he she died, at age 97, before he could write her story.  Grossman explains that he can he only write a story when it is "inevitable".

"I wrote two other books, and then suddenly I started to feel that Eva's story is the one I dream of when I sleep, and I think about when I wake up. I remained loyal to her by not beautifying her, by not erasing her toughness or her difficult ideological purity, as well as her love and compassion.  I think she would be pleased."

Part of the inevitability of the story, he continues, came about when he realised that Eva, like so many of his characters, had faced the arbitrariness of life. "All my life has circled and is circling around arbitrariness. Arbitrariness can be many things – our body that imposes our destiny on us, or emotions like jealousy that can shape us, or Israel's military occupation, or the Nazi occupation that created the most terrible thing on earth.

"And of course, the primal thing, our death, how we learn to adjust, slowly, painfully, that we are going to die and how that affects our life. How do we face arbitrariness and still remain ourselves?"

Is his writing, then, a way to gain control over the arbitrariness?

"Writing about it does not mean I have control," he responds. "Sometimes I lose control to the writing. But I have learned that once we find the courage to face this arbitrariness, things start to change a little. We will not bring back the loved ones we lost, or prevent death, or change the relationship between ourselves and our body, and even the military occupation will not end tomorrow. But when I find my private names for the arbitrariness. I am no longer a helpless victim."

Most of Grossman's novels are filled with intricately-drawn characters and word pictures of time and place.  "I must create the character out of nothing," he says. "Gradually, the character begins to accumulate reality.  I understand how he thinks about certain issues, how he loves, how he looks, how she looks at other women and men, thousands of details of which we consist. I must live in them."

Authors, he says, are thieves. "I watch people and I steal qualities from them. And sometimes people come and tell me their stories.  To tell a story to an author is like embracing a pickpocket."

Some of the people whose stories he tells are cruel. How, for example, can he live in the head of the Nazi commandant in his novel, "See Under: Love" (published in 1986)?

"The Nazi was a horrible experience to write, he answers. "I suffered, I became sick. I wanted to understand: The Nazi's were human beings, how did they become monsters? I suffered every moment, but I am not sorry. In every one of us, there are the options of being so many characters. I don't want the terrible options to take over, but I want to know that they exist."

And then he adds, "And maybe I need to know that love will win. Not that I will turn the Nazi into a tzaddik (a righteous person) – but I wanted to show that sometimes, and if we have the right person to lead us and show us the way, something can change.  We need a good guide. Sometimes a book can be a guide.”

After finishing a novel, Grossman reveals, he writes one or two children's books.  In his most recently published book, Each Wrinkle Has a Story, (February 2022, Hebrew), a child asks his grandfather about how the wrinkles on his face came to be.  The grandfather tries to answer the child, even though some of the answers are sad and even frightening. In lovely, tender prose Grossman describes both the magic of childhood and the pain of some of life's experiences.

"When writing for children," he says, "I think about when the father or mother is reading to a child, before the child goes to sleep. I think about how frightening the night is for the child. And want to allow the child to sail into the night with a kiss on his or her cheek, a little bit happier.”

Most of Grossman's novels contain at least one scene in which a person tells his story to a careful listener.

"We each have a story that we tell from childhood until we are very old," he explains. "We become polished actors of our stories but we do not notice that we have become prisoners of our stories. If we tell the story, say our relationships with our parents, in somewhat different words, suddenly we realize that even Mama had a Mama, and Papa has the right to a psychology."

The example is from personal life, yet much of Grossman's writing is also about the intricate and inevitable confounding of the personal and the political, including the ongoing traumas of the brutal 20^th century and, especially, the way the occupation is destroying both Israel and the Palestinians.

"We talk about our narratives, the Palestinians' and the Israelis'," he says.  "A narrative is a fossilised human story, and you have to massage this narrative, until it is possible to stay a little with their story, their suffering, justice, their mistakes, and their crimes instead of throwing our narrative at them."

He talks about the death of his son, and his refusal to surrender to the "narrative of excruciating pain and the will for revenge. I have such urges, but they lead to more suffering, pain and bereavement. If I surrender to hatred and rage, I will have lost twice – by the death of Uri and by the way the situation made me in its image."

This, he says, is why he has joined and speaks for the Parents Circle Families Forum of bereaved Israelis and Palestinians, which has been strongly criticised by the Israeli right for equating Israeli victims of Palestinian terror with the death of Palestinians by the Israel Defense Forces. "It takes courage to overcome the wish for revenge on the one who devastated your life. Our pain is like everyone else's, but we have decided that we will find power that will allow us to go back to humanity before we are trapped by the situation."

Grossman is a prominent Israeli spokesperson for peace and social justice, and his public moral voice has grown even stronger following the death of his son. Yet he says that authors do not bear any responsibility to society. "There are many wonderful writers in Israel who are totally a-political," he notes. "As for myself, it is hard for me to tell the reality of even one human being without describing the situation around him.

"The service an author can do, if he chooses to, is to insist on nuance. The world is a thick place, and the thickness is what enables stereotypes and cruelty. We must not allow the situation to force us to speak thickly. We must call things by their name, be sharp in our definitions and describe, describe, even the ferocious enemy, as a human being.”

The nuance that "massages the fossilised narrative" can help to bring peace. "Peace is about life without fear.  Have we ever lived here one day of life without fear?   We come to think that war is the normal situation.  We arm ourselves more and more, until there is less knight in the armor. The essence of being a Jew throughout history is to always have been homeless, never felt really at home. We have been deported and persecuted and genocided. I yearn to have a place with a feeling of home."

In his novel, To the End of the Land, (2008) a soldier son whispers in his mother's ear that she must leave Israel. With all the loss and criticism, would Grossman think of leaving?

“After something like what happened to us happens, after you lose a son, nothing is taken for granted. Not even staying alive. You ask yourself all the questions…and I also asked myself, had we not lived here, Uri would be alive. It is as simple and cruel as that.  But we have chosen to live here, my wife, Michal and our children with our grandchildren.  This is the only relevant place for me to live. I want to live in relevance and to explore the freedom of peace."

He concludes, "For a moment I do not forget what a wonderful thing we have created here in this country. Look at this flourishing, blossoming, strong, creative, innovative country, with such energies. We could use them in a more beneficial and fruitful way if we had had peace with our neighbours. I hope this place will be worthy of my granddaughters."

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Photo: Courtesy, the Booker Prizes