David GrossmanThe Globe and Mail
Life can imitate art in the most horrific of ways, as the acclaimed Israeli author and peace activist David Grossman can painfully attest. When the story he was writing penetrated his life in a way that every parent dreads, Grossman managed, somehow, to find solace in that art. The result is his epic novel, To the End of the Land.
Recently translated into English, the novel tells the story of an Israeli family, Israeli friendship and Israel itself. Ora has two sons. When her youngest, Ofer, is called back to the army shortly after finishing his military service (compulsory for most Israeli citizens), she panics. At home alone - her husband has recently left her - she comes up with a plan: She will carry on with a hiking trip she was supposed to take with Ofer to celebrate his discharge. Off in the wilderness, she will be shielded from news of the military operation for which her son has returned to the army and, most importantly, she will not be home to receive the dreaded news that he has been killed. A message takes two to be delivered, she reasons. If she's not there to receive it, it can't really be true.
Grossman began writing the book in May, 2003, six months before his oldest son, Yonatan, was discharged from the Israeli military. He was still working on it when his younger son, Uri, began his service.
"At the time, I had the feeling - or rather, a wish," Grossman writes in the author's note at the end of the novel, "that the book I was writing would protect him."
It did not.
On Aug. 12, 2006, in the final hours of what Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, Uri, 20, and his crew, were trying to rescue soldiers from another tank when they were hit by a rocket. They were all killed.
Grossman and his family - he and his wife, Michal, also have a daughter, Ruth - were devastated, of course. But following the week of Jewish mourning called shiva, he returned to his writing.
"I think that going back to the book was an instinctive act of saving myself," Grossman said during a recent telephone interview from New York, a stop on his book tour. "I think I understood that there in this book I will find the thing that will allow me to continue."
Grossman's world view, like so many in his country, was shaped to a great extent by the Holocaust. Born in Jerusalem in 1954, he was surrounded by survivors and their trauma. Lunch as a child was eaten daily while listening to a sombre radio program dedicated to reuniting families separated during the Shoah. "In a way, I think, my generation lost its appetite because of it - not only for food," he said. "In a way, suddenly you understand what life is made of: how horrible and tragic life can be."
Grossman addressed the long-term effects of the Holocaust in his 2006 novel See Under: Love. But he was a journalist before he was a novelist and in 1988 published his seminal book, The Yellow Wind, a non-fiction tour de force for which he spent three months interviewing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
To the End of the Land is also very much about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but from a different, fictionalized perspective: that of a long-suffering but strong Jewish mother. The title has a double meaning: Ora hikes the Israel Trail, which stretches the length of the tiny country, beginning in the north, near the end of the land. But it also suggests an end to the state of Israel itself.
The subject matter, hitting so close to home, was what allowed Grossman to continue with the novel after Uri's death. "It had to be a book that is absolutely, totally relevant to the major fact of my life.
"I went back to this story, which remained one of the very few places that still were understandable to me, and I started to write and to tie together all the threads that were torn. And after some time, the pleasure of writing came back to me, the pleasure of inventing, of imagining, of fantasizing, of creating characters. It takes a lot of energy to create a character or to infuse a character with life. But if you do it, you are also saved in a way. You become alive. And it was an act of choosing life, in a way, against the gravity of life and the gravity of despair."
This idea of redemption through writing is prevalent in the novel. During her hike, Ora records in a notebook what she remembers about her sons' births, and their life together as a family. "Really, who knew it was so good to write!" she thinks.
The book was mostly written before Uri's death. Grossman returned to it with a raw, first-hand perspective - but made no major alterations.
"The story was not changed. What was changed was the writer more than anything. And the acuteness of the need to cry out with this voice; to make this voice heard."
Even before his personal tragedy, Grossman was a leading voice on Middle East peace in his country. Two days before Uri was killed, Grossman and two other noted Israeli authors - Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua - held a news conference calling for a ceasefire.
Four years later, Grossman is still calling for a two-state solution. Somehow, despite the history of his people, his country and his loved ones, he maintains some optimism for peace.
"I cannot afford the luxury of despair," he said. "Because in a very primal way it is humiliating to be desperate, to give up. In spite of what happened to me and to my family, I'm not willing to surrender to this despair. I believe that there is still a chance."
David Grossman will be at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival Thursday ( www.writersfest.bc.ca) and at the Toronto Jewish Book Fair on Saturday ( www.kofflerarts.org).