Insisting on hope amid the danger of despair

Buenos Aires Herald, Monday, 14 May 2012

Interview with David Grossman,

at the Lancaster Hotel (Thursday, 3 May)

by Andrew Graham-Yooll
for the Herald

      “I insist on hoping (for peace in Israel-Palestine). It is easy to despair. There are good reasons to believe there will be no improvement in the future. To be desperate is to declare that we have lost, that there is no chance. There has to be a place for hope.” Israeli writer David Grossman speaks like a wise man which makes him seem much older than his 58. Grossman has that problem, he sound like a sage. 

We met for an interview in Buenos Aires, but it was also a reunion and recollection of meeting a quarter of a century ago. We took part in chatty gatherings in London. The prospect of a stiff structure broke down when I told him that his hotel had something special: the English author Graham Greene stayed there when he visited Victoria Ocampo. This is where he started writing Travels with My Aunt. The Lancaster Hotel had linen sheets. 
“Graham Greene. What a coincidence. I’ve brought Travels with my Aunt with me. I read that thirty years ago, when it was first published in Israel. This is a coincidence. You’ve made my day. I know, we’ve met… the novelist Moris Farhi was there, the writers Bernice Rubens… Clive Sinclair,  Jaim Topol too. That was twenty six years ago.  We’re getting old.”  I assured him we were not: everybody else gets old, contemporaries never age. Grossman liked that. 

Grossman's father was a bus driver, then a librarian. Through him David built an interest in literature. His father, "gave me many things, but what he mostly gave me was Sholem Aleichem." Aleichem, born in Ukraine, is one of the leading writers in Yiddish, best known for the stories that inspired, Fiddler on the Roof.  Grossman’s novels include See Under: Love (1989), The Smile of the Lamb (1990), Duel (1998), among others.  His essays are Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians (1992), Death as a Way of Life (2003) and many more. He has three children, his son Uri was killed six years ago.

His new book, Falling Out of Time (not yet published in English; Más allá del tiempo, in Spanish), was launched at the BA Book Fair as Más allá del tiempo.  His writing has a combination of patience and hope…
Would he accept that description?

“It is my way of understanding my life.  That may be a limited definition. I like yours more. The act of writing is a combination of patience and hope.  It might take five years to write a book and you hope to be patient with yourself until things reveal themselves to you. You hope against all odds that things will improve, against all that reality teaches you.  You hope that there will always be an option of dialogue between people. That people might want to read the things I write in a small corner of Jerusalem and might understand them here in Buenos Aires and it will be relevant to their lives. You hope that beyond all barriers of place, of culture and language, people can still converse with each other.”

Do people converse with his writing?

“It’s a good question. I think they know that it is possible, that it is legitimate to ask for such a thing.  I remember that once I was asked about books that I have read. I turned the question round and asked to talk about books that have read me.  Books “read” every reader in a different way. This is the difference between journalism and literature. If one million people are reading the same newspaper, or watching the same news on CNN, there is something in the way the news is constructed to make us feel the same, think the same, glued together, we are made to feel the same.  I can talk about some newspapers in Israel. There is a mixture of facts and sentimentality, fact and kitsch. One million people reading the same paper each day will feel alike, they will denounce other groups, they feel superior to those others. But if ten thousand people are reading the same book at the same time, the book reads differently to each and every one. I can testify to that not only as a reader but as a writer from the letters that I get. The book plays so many roles in different contexts in the life of the readers. I never thought or planned it or imagined it possible. That is where I say the book reads the audience.” Were Israelis, as a society, poetry writers or mostly prose?

“They are more prose writers.” And yet, his last book, Falling Out of Time, is a mixture, it moves from poetry to prose and back.  

“I tend to agree, this novel is a mixture. Have you opened it?  Journalists don’t open books much… Well, you’ve only just been given it. My writing is poetic even when I write prose. When I started to write this novel I learned to write poetry. I found that poetry is a characteristic of a certain feeling. Poetry is the language of my grief, it is a book about living with grief, with loss, in my case, the loss of my son. Why is that?  I have no idea.  My wife suggested that poetry is the closest element to silence. A woman who studied the book said that poetry is the most intimate way of expresión, artistically the most intimate.  In prose you can establish a certain distance between yourself and your writing, in poetry you can’t have any distance.  My explanation is  totally physical. It is as if someone imposed on my wrist a break in the lines at certain points, as in poetry.”

I told him that in Argentina poetry is a strong element in creation, present in the tango and in musical forms (bagualas, chacareras…).  The folk trend states that there was something better in the past. We are not working towards a better future in Argentina, we feel we had a better past which we would like to recover.  We look back on the fantasy of simple values, of the gaucho as a good guy, and that sort of thing. There is a lot in writing, poetry and prose, that defines a society.

“In Israel there is a tendency in the public to indulge in nostalgia.  The present looks very confusing and the future looks shaky and fragile.  People cling to what they believe were the good times. I can’t say that the literature in Israel follows in that line. The literature is very sober, open-eyed, critical. Writers who matter in Israel have a healthy sense of self-cruelty to force their readers to look into the future and make it a little better.”

The Jewish people have had such an awful past it seems surprising that they should look back on it with nostalgia.

“This is a very good example of how tragedy can become part of an identity and how a distorted situation of victimhood can serve as a strong component of identity.  We formulate ourselves in the terminology of disaster, of victimhood, of being alienated by other people, of being different. The question is correct, why are people so eager to go back there?  Well, that is where our identity was created, where we recognize ourselves.  There is a genuine nostalgia for the early days of Israel, the first days of Zionism, when matters were clear. Maybe they were wrong, but they were clear.  For example, ignoring the Palestinian inhabitants in the land of Israel: a great part of Zionism just ignored them as if there were an empty country waiting for us.  As if nothing came before.” 

Britain seemed in part the same right into the seventies. People looked back on World War II as the one time when the population was united in their solidarity, in their readiness to pull together…  

“There was something very clear there.  The British felt they were the good guys, the rest were  bad guys, clearly defined.  For many of us now it is not clear who are the good guys and who the bad.  We are a democracy, and yet we are occupying another people. So how do you reconcile all the inner contradictions?”

Faced with all that, was there any chance that patience and hope could bring the good guys and the bad together? Modernity does not unite, it divides, because there are so many rival elements being created all the time.         

         “I insist on hoping, even though sometimes I feel I am trying to impose hope on myself because I cannot afford the luxury of despair (he has said that often before, originally in an interview in The Guardian).  It is so easy to despair.  There are many good reasons to believe there will be no improvement.  You see the distortion of the two peoples,  both act against their inherent interests just to cause damage on the other side. They distrust one another deeply.  Yet I feel that to be desperate is to declare that we have lost, that there is no place for hope.  We are trapped in a paradox, throughout our history we have survived to live.  Now we live only in order to survive.  This is wrong. The trouble is that people on the edge of the abyss feel threatened, and to them talk about the chances for a future of peace sounds much like fantasy.  But it has to be made real.”