Guilt wasn’t the only emotion on Oz’s mind while he joked about about his more than 40 years of work with New Republic senior editor Ruth Franklin. For one thing, he always came back to the theme of unhappiness. At one point he offered, “If you asked me to describe my work in one word, it would be ‘families.’ If you gave me two, it would be ‘unhappy families.’ ” His latest work, Scenes From Village Life, recently translated into English, capitalizes on this Tolstoyan trope. It was born out of a dream, which he morphed into a novel-in-stories about the fictional village of Tel Ilan. Like many of his other books, it is about love, loss, and loneliness. (In one story, an Arab character, Adel, tells an Israeli character, Pesach, “Our unhappiness is partly our fault and partly your fault. But your unhappiness comes from your soul.”)

The evening also centered around translation. Oz read long portions in both Hebrew and English; when asked whether he was happy with the English translation, he responded in the affirmative, saying that one must be “unfaithful in order to be loyal.” He also told the now famous story of how one of his most successful books, A Tale of Love and Darkness, was translated into Arabic (the family of an Israeli Arab victim of anti-Semitic terrorism paid for it).

Oz is quick to separate his fiction from his politics: “I have two pens on my desk,” he insisted (no, he doesn’t use a computer), “one pen to tell stories and another pen to tell the government to go to hell.” As Franklin pressed him, though, it became clear that truly decoupling these two things is almost impossible. Oz conceded as much, saying that, as an author, all he can do is disclaim that his fiction is not an allegory of Israeli life. “People will read it that way anyway,” he sighed. “I can’t help it.”

The highest-ranked Jew is Philip Roth, at 25:1, up slightly from last year’s 33:1. But generally, the Jews face worse odds than last year: E.L. Doctorow dropped from 22:1 to 33:1; Amos Oz 25:1 to 33:1; Shlomo Kalo 45:1 to 50:1; A.B. Yehoshua 50:1 to 66:1; and Jonathan Littell 66:1 to 80:1. Only Bob Dylan, the perennial long shot, stayed steady at 100:1. The committee has been relatively kind to Jews, awarding the prize to five (Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, Elfriede Jelinek, and Harold Pinter) in the past 25 years. By contrast, only one American has been selected during that time (Toni Morrison); the committee’s head has made it explicit that he doesn’t consider American literature to be all that great.

So, probably Adonis, and probably not a Jew. Then again, last year, the talk was about how Howard Jacobson was the underdog for the Man Booker Prize, and we know what happened there.

Nobel Prize in Literature Odds [Betting Pros]
Related: Nobel Prize Judge Slams American Literature [Guardian]
Earlier: Jews Are Longshots to Win Nobel, Booker
Howard Jacobson Pulls Off Booker Upset

The simple answer was that Hirsch, 34, was there to recruit volunteers for a two-day event he was planning to stage and film on a rocky, bramble-strewn hilltop midway between the ancient cities of Beit Shean and Tiberias.

The kibbutzniks were needed to construct sets and props, hand-dye costumes, and act out a loosely adapted version of “The Way of the Wind,” an early Amos Oz story re-envisioned by the artist as a thoughtfully crafted “art spectacle.”

Scripted, story-boarded, and shot out of sequence, Hirsch’s work is not exactly a “happening” in the purest tradition of performance art. Nor, because of its coherent narrative structure, does it quite qualify as video art, which tends to be fragmentary. Rather, Hirsch sees his work as a genre-bending hybrid of cinema and performance art. Whatever you call it, it’s clear from all of Hirsch’s work that his roots are in the kibbutz and that it is the terrain he mines for creative inspiration. He may be unsparingly critical of its sclerotic ideology and stifling atmosphere, but he celebrates its spirit.

Oded Hirsch, center.

In his current piece, Hirsch’s intention is to direct this cast of volunteer kibbutzniks—wearing uniform white T-shirts, red socks, black boots and kibbutz-issue blue work pants—in an anguished yet absurd mission to “rescue” one of their own as he dangles helplessly from a mesh of wires slung between two electrical pylons.

In the original Oz story, the victim is an effete poet and dreamer, a source of profound disappointment to his father, a red-blooded Zionist, and one of the founding fathers of the kibbutz. When the son becomes trapped in the course of paratroop jump performed as part a military parade, the enraged father can only hurl insults at his terrified son.

The story ends tragically when the son, in a desperate bid to end the shame of his own cowardice, throws himself onto the electrified wires just as a young kibbutz boy, his chief tormentor, reaches out to snatch him to safety.

Hirsch pointedly veers from this ending and shifts the drama toward a final surge by kibbutz members who successfully get the victim aground, though it’s never made clear if he’s dead or alive.

Hirsch is intensely interested in the central Oedipal drama at the core of the original narrative (a theme he has explored in past work), but he adjusts the focus to the “how” of the rescue and the group effort it takes to achieve it.

The drama’s participants include men and women, young and old, all drawn from the clusters of kibbutzim scattered throughout the Jordan Valley. What ultimately wins over this group of would-be actors is Hirsch’s plea that what he is generating is not “merely” art but a communal event and, simply, that he needs their help.

Suddenly he has 120 people signed on. It’s a weird reprise of the very subject of the piece: an absurd rescue of a kibbutz son who has rejected the kibbutz way of life.

Tangled feelings are at the heart of both Hirsch’s life and art. Though his work has been received warmly in New York, his adopted home, he has barely exhibited in Israel nor has he ever received a shekel in grant money. His current project is funded by grants from the U.S.-based Six Points Fellowship and the Jerome Foundation.

Ambivalence and ambiguity are, in a sense, his key raw materials: He’s at his most comfortable straddling Israel and the Diaspora; the highly individual act of creativity and the community organizing it requires; performance art and cinema; the political and the personal; meaning and absurdity.

That intriguing uncertainty is evident in Tochka, a 2010 work currently on display at MASS MoCA in a group exhibit called The Workers, an exploration of blue-collar culture, the friction between social classes, and the changing nature of labor in a global economy. Classical kibbutz figures in oversize field hats and blue work clothes are seen engaged in an act that is as physically grueling as it is irrational: constructing a primitive bridge across a ravine that could easily be forded on foot.

In this latest piece, ironically dubbed There Is Nothing New, there’s a much easier way to accomplish the mission than the ingenious but circuitous effort devised by the rescuers: Just place a tall ladder under the trapped soldier and cut him down.

Instead, Hirsch’s actors strain to bend the towers toward each other to relax the tautness of the wires that entrap the soldier, after laboriously digging enough dirt out of the rocky ground to form a mound high enough for him to rest on. It’s his way of subverting the myth of the can-do pioneer and highlighting its irrelevance to contemporary kibbutz life.

Hirsch’s main concern here is not the outcome but the communal effort required to achieve it—an inversion of the utilitarianism at the heart of kibbutz ideology. Though he rejects the pieties of the past, he has not given up on the value of communal enterprise.

This is a powerful statement in an age when three quarters of Israel’s kibbutzim have moved away from strict socialism toward capitalism and privatization.

But in stark contrast to the easy camaraderie and light-hearted banter of the kibbutzniks in between takes, the mood generated by the spectacle itself is hardly warm and fuzzy. People seem to be working together here, but are they? There’s no dialogue, no interaction, virtually no action. It’s a communal act utterly lacking in communal spirit, and the feeling, deliberately, is one of alienation.

By underscoring the absurd, Sisyphean nature of the enterprise, Hirsch also drives home a point about the political scene in Israel today and the hollow resourcefulness of its leaders. “My generation is tired of politics,” Hirsch said. “Nothing ever changes.” If his parents and grandparents had all the answers, his cohort has only questions.

This reflects a common attitude among the thirtysomething generation in Israel that has grown disgusted with a cigar-chomping, sybaritic political elite more invested in perpetuating their careers than in solving the country’s problems. The political pendulum swings from right to left and back again, but peace is elusive, corruption is all too common, and social problems continue to fester.

Hirsch is one of a cadre of young artists acting out highly stylized, absurd tableaux as an expression of the surreal gap between Israel’s well-oiled consumerism and its fraught existential predicament. He cites as inspiration Israeli performance artists Guy Ben-Ner and Yael Bartana, whose works explore themes of home, belonging, displacement, and exile.

Yet for all the anomie Hirsch’s work can evoke, the raw urgency of the country’s founding generation bleeds through. For them, politics and collectivism were not a choice but a matter of survival. It was the crude but inexorable landscape in which they operated, and it’s largely thanks to their pluck and ingenuity that today’s generation can choose to opt out.

Though his work flirts with nihilism, there’s nothing remotely jaded about Hirsch. Even as he takes pot shots at some of its shibboleths, he pays homage to the kibbutz ethos on which he was nourished, affirming a belief in “groups of people, anywhere, acting together to fulfill a dream.”

***

As evening fell on the first day of filming early last month, the kibbutzniks gathered around a campfire to act out one of Hirsch’s scenes. They were directed to sit quietly and gaze intently at a fire. But while the artist and his crew discussed camera angles, a kibbutznik pulled out a simple chalil and the group broke into a series of early pioneer songs.

These moments in between scenes, which Hirsch also records, are as meaningful to the artist as the film itself. They are also the occasion for amused exchanges between the participants:

“Do you get what he’s trying to do here?”

“No. But I’m convinced it’s going to be his best production yet.”

By now their commitment to the project—and the artist—is absolute.

The kibbutzim’s third generation is famous both for its defection from and its re-invention of the kibbutz. But one of the beautiful things about them is that no matter how far they wander they’re never too far from home.

Toby Perl Freilich is a freelance filmmaker and writer in New York and Jerusalem. Her forthcoming documentary Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment was excerpted in Tablet Magazine last year.

***

Some authors focus on the present moment and record the perspectives of the people on the ground. In The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem (Routledge, February)—a translation of 2007’s Kikar Hashuk Reka—Hillel Cohen surveys internal Palestinian politics and explains that it’s not just peacenik Israelis whose hopes have been dashed since the Second Intifada, but also those hoping for a part of Jerusalem as capital of a Palestinian state. Michael Riordon speaks to those optimists (or Pollyannas) who continue to agitate and hold out hope for compromise and stability in Our Way to Fight: Israeli and Palestinian Activists for Peace (Chicago Review, May). Jennifer Griffin and Greg Myre, a mom-and-pop pair of journalists who report for Fox News and the New York Times, have collaborated on a book the subtitle of which emphasizes its of-the-moment quality: This Burning Land: Lessons From the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Wiley, March). One fears, though, that all these books, recently researched as they may be, hit the shelves already out of date, given the consequences we’ve already seen developing for Israel, and for the Palestinian population and leadership, of the ongoing revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere.

***

One thing not likely to change: Minorities will still have strained relationships to the mainstream in Israel, as they do everywhere else. Amal Jamal—himself a Druze Israeli and, as a professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, one of the most prominent non-Jewish academics in the country—studies the political behavior of Arab Israelis in comparative contexts in Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel: The Politics of Indigeneity (Routledge, March). Joyce Dalsheim treats another minority that also relates fractiously to the secular Jewish majority in Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (Oxford, March). Having done fieldwork among the settlers, Dalsheim offers insights into the political, theological, and social dimensions of life in pre-withdrawal Gaza.

***

To many, Israel’s complexities just make it that much more fascinating. Even a piece of cheery, visually exuberant promotion like Aviva Werner’s Experience Modern Israel: Explore, Discover, Connect (Behrman, April, ages 10-12) acknowledges that part of the appeal of Israel is arguing about it: Among other features of the book and the companion digital experience, designed to market the country to the pre-bar mitzvah set, are sections titled “Debate It,” in which students “discuss the separation barrier and other hot topics.” Good times! A better selling point, Werner seems to realize, is the landscape, which photographs beautifully. There’s good precedent for this, according to Boaz Neumann’s newly translated Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Brandeis, May): Neumann takes seriously all the earnest paeans to the land in the diaries and literary works of Zionist pioneers, understanding their passion for territory, both symbolic and concrete, as foundational to the Israeli enterprise.

***

Despite the conflicts—or because of them?—books on every aspect of Israeli society proliferate, topic by ever more specific topic. Raz Yosef’s The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Routledge, February) examines the spate of award-winning films produced in Israel over the past decade, emphasizing their framing of painful experiences as personal, rather than national, struggles. Daniel Maman and Zeev Rosenhek, two sociologists, turn their attention to the country’s financial system in The Israeli Central Bank: Political Economy, Global Logics and Local Actors (Routledge, March), tracking the competition between the central bank and the Ministry of Finance. Aaron Pribble, a self-described “redneck Jew-boy” whose minor-league baseball career has included stints on the Toulouse Tigers and Sonoma County Crushers, chronicles a brief, recent interlude in the history of Israeli professional athletics in Pitching in the Promised Land: A Story of the First and Only Season in the Israel Baseball League (Nebraska, April); Pribble witnessed all the glory and awkwardness from the mound, as a southpaw for the Tel Aviv Lightning. Meir Finkel—director of the Israeli Defense Force’s Ground Forces Concept Development and Doctrine Department—offers tips that will come in handy for anyone managing a military force in On Flexibility: Recovery From Technological and Doctrinal Surprise on the Battlefield (Stanford, March); he offers such historical examples of effective military responsiveness as “The German Recovery From the Soviet T-34 Tank Surprise” and “The Israeli Recovery From the Egyptian Sagger Missile Surprise.” And, finally, in Law and the Culture of Israel (Oxford, April), Menachem Mautner identifies the Israeli Supreme Court as the institution through which Israeli secularists, looking to Anglo-American liberalism for their models, resist the religious fundamentalism that asserts itself elsewhere in Israeli political life. By highlighting the particularities of the Israeli courts, army, baseball league, financial industry, and movie business, such books help to fend off the reductive thinking so persistently applied to the country.

***

Meanwhile, in his most recently translated book, Amos Oz effaces the particularities, mapping the emotional and mythic dimensions of the conflicts he has witnessed onto an abstracted fable about the disappearance of all the fauna—“even bugs and reptiles, bees-flies-ants-worms-mosquitoes-moths, hadn’t been seen for many a year”—from an isolated village. Titled Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest (Harcourt, March), the book comes recommended for young adults, but it works as an allegory for adults, too: With whom would a tale about how communities and individuals struggle with their collective losses not resonate?

with few exceptions, the following generalization still stands: Oz and Yehoshua and Grossman tell stories of men and women who are wrecked by reality, who try to escape it but can’t, who do their best and discover that their best isn’t enough.

The same could be said about their political sensibilities. Grossman described it best. “It’s not that I think that suddenly Jews and Arabs can walk hand in hand towards the sunset,” he told me. “That’s not the case. But I think there’s a place somewhere in between the Hollywood ending and being tossed into the sea. There is nuance. And that’s where we need to go, to those places where we can have a life that is possible, where we could slowly douse the flames and control the madness, no more.”

But the madness, as artists should know better than most, is often all that there is. The madness starts wars and writes great novels and propels throngs of people to either love or hate their fellow man. And the madness is what we need writers for, because the madness is sublime and without it there is much that matters but not much that can move us.

In a somewhat complementary way, contributing editor Daphne Merkin urged readers to divorce Grossman’s latest novel, To the End of the Land, from his life-story.

Pen Pals
Earlier: The Tailor David Grossman

What follows, largely unencumbered by the burdens of plot, is the story of Dolly, a psychotic doctor who finds an abandoned baby and then—driven by love, guilt, anxiety and all the other emotional foundations on which the mythical figure of the Jewish mother proudly stands—proceeds to torture him and others in hilarious and heartbreaking ways.

Such villainy, naturally, requires its own lair, which Dolly has in Dolly City, her apartment in an impossibly tall high-rise in the center of a barely recognizable Israel. A lick of language is enough to ascertain that by entering Dolly City, one has left behind all that is safe and familiar. Consider the following stretch, in which Dolly wonders what to name her newfound toddler: “I lay down on my giant bed and watched the TV shows picked up by the satellite dishes on the roof, smoking like a chimney as I did so. For a moment I caught myself whistling for the dog, and a string snapped in my body, C sharp, then I closed my eyes, and decided to call him Son, so that if anyone ever called him a son of a bitch, he’d take it personally and beat them up for the both of us.” In one breathless muttering, Castel-Bloom welds together the banal (those satellite dishes on the roof), the clichéd (smoking like a chimney), the deeply personal (the specific notation of the sentimental string that is snapped at the memory of the departed dog), the absurd (a son named Son), and the profane (Son being called a son of a bitch).

These are fine ingredients for literature, but Castel-Bloom’s aims are far above the merely aesthetic: Her Dolly City looks nothing like Israel, and yet it is probably the most emotionally honest portrait of the Jewish state produced in the past four decades. Just compare Dolly City to, say, Amos Oz’s Jerusalem: The eminence grise of Hebrew letters helped solidify his status with somber novels such as My Michael, in which the heroine, Hannah Gonen, fantasizes about being ravished by a pair of Arab twins with whom she played as a child. Oz’s landscape is all internal, psychic space, and his imaginary sex scene reads like softcore porn directed by Ingmar Bergman—tortured, overwrought, and ridiculous.

Castel-Bloom, on the other hand, has no need for grand psychological devices. On the subject of Arabs, as on any other subject, she gets straight to the point. “I discovered a new type of phobia in Dolly City—Arabophobia, fear of Arabs,” she writes. “I once read somewhere that you should tackle fear head-on. Fuck Arabs, if you’re afraid of them. You fuck them—and you see that the devil’s not as black as he’s painted, they’re just like everybody else.”

Such deceptively simple riffs do more than just shatter Israeli literature’s penchant for the metaphorical—all those family quibbles serving as the national drama writ small. It also takes a simple and courageous stand in support of normal life: If only you saw them without their clothes on, you’d understand that Arabs, just like anyone else, are ordinary people, not some symbolic stand-in for otherness and the complexity of life in a conflict zone.

This may sound like an obvious proclamation; in the ideologically charged vista that is Israel’s literary landscape, it is not. While in America narratives of romantic relationships between whites and Indians were common throughout the 18th and 19th centuries—the literary historian Werner Sollors called it the “red-white fusion”—Israeli literature had scrupulously avoided any mention of the possibility of real romance between Jews and Arabs. There could never be a Palestinian Pocahontas; whatever interactions the two peoples had were confined to fighting, fucking, or other forms of dominance. In one tart paragraph, Castel-Bloom presents a real alternative, filthy and sexy and inspired and eminently human. Life, she proposes daringly, could be just life again.

The same is true for nearly every word in this short and magical book. Even as the plot spirals from one horror to another—here’s Dolly using a rope and a rat to slowly drain the life out of an airline executive, and there she is with a scalpel and rampant bloodlust in some run-down German orphanage—the novel’s overall spirit is one of deep-seated humanism. In a society so heavily encumbered by the weight of war and remembrance, Castel-Bloom insists, the only decent form of exorcism is shamanic, absurdist, disturbing, but, ultimately, cleansing. Whether we read the book as a meditation on motherhood—and it is, I believe, one of the most inspired explorations of the topic ever written—as an excavation of the roots of the collective Israeli psyche, or as a bit of both, we’re bound to feel immensely relieved when setting free our gnawing fears and howling anxieties; seeing the beasts run wild makes them less scary.

In her particular style—melding the concrete and the absurd, the terrible and the funny, the hopeful and the grim—Castel-Bloom recalls another masterful bard of modernity and its complexities, the French writer Boris Vian. Now largely forgotten, Vian wrote works that were at once real and surreal; his stories, rooted in seemingly senseless settings, unfurled to reveal a hard ground of empathy and compassion in which human relationships could blossom even in the most inclement conditions. Castel-Bloom has mastered the same difficult trick.

Of course, anything that’s truly profound and radical is likely to stir up its share of resentment, and Castel-Bloom is no exception. When she first emerged as a new voice in the hushed halls of Israeli literature, she was slapped with the derogatory label of being a practitioner of “thin language;” in Castel-Bloom’s apoplectic prose, in her humor and her warmth, the dons of culture saw little of merit. I myself was temporarily ejected from my perch as a counselor in a youth movement when, at 16, I shared with my peers the scene in which Dolly slices open a few dozen German orphans to find a suitable kidney for her kid. Here’s how the scene ends: Returning home to Dolly City, Dolly realizes that her child never needed the kidney to begin with. Melancholy, she stares out of her apartment’s window.

“I looked out the window,” Castel-Bloom writes, “but how long can you go on looking out of the window at rushing trains? Especially when they’re rushing to where these trains were rushing. All the trains in Dolly City rushed to Dachau and back again. Not that Dachau, just some old plank with the name Dachau written on it, a kind of memorial.”

This, Castel-Bloom cheerfully reminds us, is what happens when mythology is abused, when icons turn hollow, when the politics of fear rots the meaning out of life. When that happens, the only sane solution is to grab that knife, move to the 37th floor of a skyscraper, and reinvent the world as a more uninhibited, madder, better place.

Next week brings Britain’s Man Booker Prize announcement. Here we have a stronger rooting interest: Harold Jacobson, whose nominated The Finkler Question was reviewed by books critic Adam Kirsch today, is one of only six names on the shortlist. His book remains, however, the underdog at 7:1 odds; Tom McCarthy’s C is the 2:1 favorite.

UPDATE: No idea how I missed the four (4!) Jewish Nobel laureates since Brodsky, especially since I knew that three of them were Jewish (have to plead ignorance on Jelinek). But as more than one commenter pointed out, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, Elfriede Jelinek, and Harold Pinter, have won since Brodsky. Which means, of course, that five Jews have won the award since 1987. The number of Americans? One (Toni Morrison).

Nobel Literature Prize Betting Odds [Ladbrokes]
Booker Prize Betting Odds [Ladbrokes]
Related: Mirror Images [Tablet Magazine]

Headline implying this can all mostly be chalked up to the narcissism of small differences: Check.

Opening anecdote involving peaceful practice of benign religious ritual: Check.

“Then the bulldozers arrived at dawn”: Check.

Justify article by noting that this small conflict is in fact microcosmic of the larger one: Check.

Note that yet at the same time this one conflict is unique and idiosyncratic (in this case, the Arabs in question are Israeli Bedouins, not Palestinians): Check.

Quote Israeli spokesperson to the effect that Israel is acting within the law: Check.

Quote esteemed left-wing Israeli professor begrudgingly agreeing but nonetheless disagreeing with Israeli policy: Check.

Buttress that with prominent left-wing Israeli novelist (in this case, Amos Oz): Check.

Close on Jews and Muslims protesting Israeli policy together: Check.

A Test of Wills Over a Patch of Desert [NYT]
Earlier: A Settled Schtick

• A small group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis declared lox to be unkosher due to a certain parasite that salmon can host. Most rabbis disagree, though, so stick that on your bagel and eat it. [Grub Street]

• Prominent Palestinian lawyer Elias Khoury was moved by his son’s murder by a Palestinian terrorist to pay for the translation of top Israeli writer Amos Oz into Arabic. [NYT]

• Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s anti-Semitism envoy and a one-time J Street board member, said that anti-Semitism’s foes need more non-Jews on their side. [JTA]

• Eight Republican senators expressed worry over appointing a U.S. ambassador to Syria for the first time in five years. [Laura Rozen]

• Los Angeles Laker star, skilled defender, and crazy person Ron Artest had the word “Defense” dyed into his (dyed-yellow) hair in several languages, including Hebrew. [Deadspin]

Below, the making of the haircut:

Roth is in good company—Israel’s Amos Oz is also a finalist for his book Rhyming Life and Death, as is the musician Nick Cave, whose second novel, The Death of Bunny Monroe, came out earlier this year. There’s one woman, Sanjida O’Connell, among the 10, a disparity which begets the question of whether women authors write sex scenes less often than men or simply less poorly.

Bad Sex Award Shortlist Pits Philip Roth Against Stiff Competition [Guardian]

Herta Müller Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature [NYT]

Amos Oz Tops Betting for Nobel Literature Prize [Monsters and Critics]

For if there is one mystery that has been well and truly exploded, it is the mystery of fictional creation. In the 1960s, postmodernists like John Barth and Italo Calvino wrote programmatic novels to remind us that fiction is, as its name suggests, something made, that fictional characters are just words on a page, that reality cannot be transformed into literature without distorting it. This was not as shocking a revelation as those writers made it seem—Laurence Sterne made the same points, with more humor, in Tristram Shandy—but it is true that, ever since, ambitious novelists have shied away from anything that might seem like naïve realism. In the 21st century, readers know that the only possible answer to Oz’s question, “Do you draw the material for your stories from your imagination or directly from life?”, is “both, and neither.”

Rhyming Life and Death is simply a dramatization of that truth or truism, but it is so modestly and deftly done that it manages to make an old theme yield new pleasures. Some magicians are so skillful that, even after they show you step by step how a trick is performed, you still enjoy seeing them do it. So too with Oz, who has been one of Israel’s most prominent writers for almost half a century. Rhyming Life and Death is a treatise on just how arbitrary and willful the writing of fiction is. Oz shows us how the Author seizes on a random passerby and builds a story around her, how he invents details out of thin air, how he manipulates his characters to gratify his own juvenile desires. Yet even as he is explaining all this, and making himself—or at least, the Author—look rather unlovely in the process, we find to our surprise that we still care about the characters and stories he is so casually summoning up. So profound is our love of narrative, Oz shows, that we are ready to believe any story, even a story we are being told not to believe.

When we first glimpse the Author, he is sitting in a café near the Shunia Shor Community Center, preparing for his reading and for those annoying questions he is sure to encounter. (The time, we eventually learn, is the early 1980s, but in Oz’s wry commentary on Israeli politics, all the references to current events could just as easily come from 2009—corruption, terror, American peace-brokering, and so on.) Soon the Author is distracted by a waitress, whom he begins to ogle: he can make out the outline of her underpants through her skirt. His eyes fix on this barely discernible shape: he finds a slight asymmetry in favor of the left buttock exciting.” This kind of self-pleasuring delectation is something writers of Oz’s generation take for granted as one of the perks of writing fiction—Bellow and Roth both do it constantly—and it is likely to strike younger readers as a little obnoxious. In fact, Oz himself is quite willing to acknowledge this—he writes that the waitress’s face “expresses disgust and entreaty: just leave me alone, for heaven’s sake.”

And the Author is happy to leave the waitress alone, because he is not really interested in her as a person. What he wants is the “barely discernible” detail from which, as Oz proceeds to demonstrate, a whole fiction can spring. For the Author goes on to decide that the waitress, with whom he never exchanges an actual word, is named Ricky, and that when she was sixteen “she fell in love with the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team, Charlie, who turned up one rainy day in his Lancia in front of the beauty parlor where she worked and swept her away for a three-day break in a hotel in Eilat (of which an uncle of his was part-owner).” The details multiply and feed on themselves with delightful unaccountability: not just names and places but the make of the car, the name of the football team, even the off-stage uncle. From an idle glance, the Author has created all the cirumstances of a life, and the more arbitrary they are, the more plausible they appear.

But Ricky is just the beginning. The two men chatting at another table, the Author decides, are a small-time gangster and his toady, whom he names Mr. Leon and Shlomo Hougi. They are talking about their friend Ovadya Hazzam, who won a fortune in the lottery and lived the good life for a few years, before getting liver cancer and ending up in Ichilov Hospital. When the Author moves on from the café to the reading, his antic fiction-making continues. He assigns names to the people in the audience and invents biographies for them: this weedy teenager is a budding poet, that middle-aged matron is the neighbor he shares his work with and has lustful dreams about.

There is no doubt about the facility of the Author’s imagination: he has soon peopled the whole community center with characters. It is a problem for Rhyming Love and Death, however, that all of these characters are familiar, bordering on clichés. The “pimply” poet who “loves this Author de profundis, secretly and passionately” and the matron whose “lips are parted with the sweetness of the cultural experience she is undergoing” are stereotypes we have seen before. It is unclear whether we are supposed to think of the Author as having limited powers of invention, or if Oz is setting himself the challenge of inventing stories from such unpromising material.

Certainly there could be no bigger cliché than the sexually repressed spinster who lives alone with her cat. But that is how the Author imagines Rochele Reznik, the professional reader who is on hand to recite passages from the Author’s book. Rochele quickly moves to the center of the Author’s fantasy, and Rhyming Life and Death plays out two scenarios for her. In one, she and the author end up having sex, in a graphic scene reminiscent of the famous, clinically detailed Harold Brodkey story “Innocence.” In the other, she is too timid to respond to the Author’s flirtation, and she retreats back into her loneliness. (In a nice touch, Rochele’s apartment is decorated with a Peace Now poster that bears the slogan “Our sons’ lives matter more than the patriarchs’ graves!” Oz, we remember, was one of the founders of Peace Now, but he is clearly not above poking fun at its high-mindedness.)

While juggling these alternatives, the Author also keeps returning to the many other stories he has invented along the way. We get regular updates on Ovadya Hazzan in his hospital bed and the teenage poet in his nocturnal wanderings. Ricky has an odd telephone conversation with Lucy, the woman who stole Charlie from her long ago. (I don’t know if the name Ricky and Lucy are Oz’s, or if the translator, Nicholas de Lange, chose them as an American equivalent to some Israeli TV reference; either way, they are inspired in their comic banality.) Another audience member, the miserable Arnold Bartok, is seen taking care of his elderly, incontinent mother; he becomes a kind of vengeful Fury in the Author’s mind, interrupting his lovemaking with Rochele, bringing thoughts of bodily decay and death.

Indeed, Oz shows, the Author’s creations may be in his power, but they also hold power over him. “This is a bad business, all of it here, ridiculous and terrible,” the Author reflects near the end of the book. Yet he goes on making stories nonetheless—and despite all the trade secrets Oz reveals in Rhyming Life and Death, we go on reading them.

Isaksen had traveled to Egypt in the late 1990s, and to Syria in 2000 (both times on artistic scholarships), but he’d never been to Israel or the West Bank. Newly intrigued, he decided to go there and interview Israelis and Palestinians and gather some impressions of the conflict. Isaksen visited the region during the Second Intifada, meeting with some 20 leading Israeli and Palestinian writers—among them Yoram Kaniuk, Meir Shalev, Mahmoud Darwish, and Liana Badr—in their homes, and in the cafes of Tel Aviv and Ramallah. Literature and War, a book chronicling 14 of these conversations, has just been published.

Isaksen, who is 40, lives in Bergen, Norway. He has a Master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Norway, and has published four novels about modern Norwegian life.

The writers you spoke to were divided about the role that reading one another’s literature could play in fostering peace. Some said peace had to come before societies could share their writing, and some said that sharing literature could help bring about peace.

Literature is about reading and having an experience through others. In the beginning [of the book], I refer to André Brink, a South African writer. In South Africa, while the apartheid regime was still there, he and some other white South Africans started to read work by some black South Africans. He said that he really began to understand the life of black South Africans just by reading their literature. And then some black South Africans started reading some of André Brink’s work, and they started meeting.

It started with writers, and moved to other arts. And this whole movement with black and white writers reading each other was crucial in tearing down the old regime.

Jews are often touchy about comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa.

It is really the best example of the power of literature that I came across, and also a well-known problem. I am not at all trying to compare Israel to South Africa. And I totally agree with Amos Oz that the South African conflict was a simple conflict. You always knew who the good guys and bad guys were, just like a western movie or a melodrama. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is much more complex.

The Israeli writer Etgar Keret says that taboos in Israel are the Holocaust, terror victims, and fallen soldiers. Palestinians like Yahia Yakhlif had their own taboos—religion, sex, and politics. What do you think these unwritten rules say about the two societies?

All the other Israeli writers I spoke to said, There are no taboos here, we are totally free to write about anything.” But Keret is right, from his own experiences. Teachers refuse to teach some of his short stories.

But on the Palestinian side, the taboos are felt much more. It’s not like Syria, where there is state power suppressing the writers. In Palestinian society, they are afraid. These writers have received letters from people who don’t like their writing, threats from ordinary people if they are being critical—especially about Islam—or if they are being too open about sex…So the well-known writers, such as [the late poet Mahmoud] Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan, don’t publish their books in Palestine. They publish in Lebanon.

David Grossman is one of the few Jewish writers you interviewed who speaks Arabic. Do you think that affects his work?

He said to me that when you learn someone’s language, you get more of the nuances in the culture. On the Palestinian side, the general feeling is that Israel is just looking to Europe and America, and turning her back on her neighbors and on the Arab world. If you look on a map, Israel is part of the Arab world.

In Norway, people have said—of the chapter with [Israeli] Dorit Rabinyan about the Mizrahim [Jews of Arab descent]—that they didn’t know anything about this population. Half the population in Israel is Mizrahim, and their language was Arabic and the culture was Arabic. What happened? Why did they get no voice?

It’s interesting the way Dorit describes what happened to Mizrahim in Israel. They were mistrusted because they looked like Arabs, so they tried to suppress their own identities. They had to abandon their past and take upon themselves the European Jewish history, like the Holocaust. And now to show how Jewish they are, they tend to be the ones who speak out against Arabs.

One of my favorite interviews was with Orly Castel-Bloom, who wrote Dolly City, about a city suffering from Arabophobia—the fear of Arabs.

There are many ways of dealing with how Jews feel about the Arabs. She doesn’t try to understand them. She isn’t trying to paint the whole picture of the Arab human being. She’s just showing, in a humorous way, how Israelis tend to talk about them and look at them. And it’s effective, because it makes you think, Wow, is this the way people would think about an Arab?”

In his interview, the Palestinian writer Ghassan Zaqtan also discusses the story of Mizrahi Jews dropping their Arab identities. Were you surprised at the extent to which Palestinians know Israeli society?

In Palestinian schools you won’t find much information about Israel at all, or about Jews. But Palestinian writers read about Israelis, and they know about Jews. Israeli writers don’t know that much about Palestinian life or culture.

David Grossman says that the occupied always tend to seek information about their occupiers, in order to understand what is going on and also maybe to survive, whereas the occupier—Israelis—won’t try to understand Palestinian culture. It’s partly because Israelis know in some way that they have to take a lot of responsibility for the misery of the Palestinians, and they are not ready to do that.

A lot of the Palestinian writers you spoke to, like Liana Badr, emphasized that prior to the founding of the State of Israel, Jews and Arabs lived in harmony in Israel.

Palestinians say that before 1948, the area was a place for everyone: Christians, Muslims, and Jews. But when Israel was established there was this new conception that Israel should be a state just for Jewish people. This pre-1948 harmony, we know in some sense, is an ideal, because of course there were conflicts before 1948, too.

Israelis in general—at least the writers and left-wingers—say the end of the conflict is a two-state solution, Israel alongside Palestine. Many Palestinian writers say that the best way is one state for two people—both Israelis and Palestinians live in one state, and both have access to Haifa and Yafo. European Jews, with their experiences from the Holocaust, tend to think about the conflict in very fatal terms. It’s not just a question about living together in harmony or not, but of will the Jewish people survive?”

One point you raise with several Palestinians is that they are employed by the Palestinian Authority even as they write. Do you think this affects their work?

In the West we say if there’s one thing a writer should be it’s free, especially from the government. But Palestinian writers don’t see a problem in working for the government. There is no powerful state and no powerful government. And not many Palestinian writers can make a living from their writing.

After these interviews, do you have greater sympathy for one side or another?

A problem in Norway, as in most European countries, is that we don’t really discuss this. We say if you are on the left, you tend to support the Palestinians. And if you try to understand the Israelis, you come across as conservative. It’s frustrating to experience this year after year. What I was really trying to do when interviewing these artists was just to forget all my knowledge. I wanted to start fresh.

What role do you see Israeli and Palestinian writers playing in their own countries?

The young writers don’t want to be prophets anymore. They want to explore. It’s part of a common modernist movement, not seeing literature as a way of giving answers and simple messages, but as a place where you try to approach problems from different angles. I guess many readers still look at writers as someone special, like a prophet, but most writers seem uncomfortable with that position.

Ghassan Zaqtan was part of the PLO movement, and he used to look at himself as a political writer. But now he says he doesn’t want to be at the front of a demonstration. If there is a demonstration he doesn’t want to lead it but walk behind it, record what’s going on, and reflect.

Daniella Cheslow is a freelance writer and photographer based in Israel.

An unforgettable scene in Fellini’s film Roma depicts the discovery of an ancient catacomb filled with breathtaking murals. But when the murals are exposed to the spotlights of the researchers and camera crew, they fade and quickly vanish.

Explaining the process of inspiration, for me, is like trying to explain what occurs in a dream. In both cases we must resort to using words to describe an experience that by nature resists definition. In both cases we can rationally analyze the events and consider, for example, the themes and characters that may have influenced the dreamer and the needs that led him to conjure up these particular influences rather than others in his dream. But we will always feel that the essence of the dream, its secret, the unique glimmer of contact between the dreamer and the dream, remains an impenetrable riddle.

I remember what I experienced when I felt I was under the rays of a vast and inspiring literary power—when I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for example, or Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous, or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. I have no doubt that some part of me, perhaps my innermost core, seemed to be in the realm of a dream. There was a similar intrinsic logic, and a direct dialogue conducted with the deepest and most veiled contents of my soul, almost without the mediation of consciousness.

When I talk, then, of this or the other author and how he or she touched my life and influenced my writing, I know that it is merely the story I tell myself today, in a waking state, under the spotlights, filtered through the natural sifting process of memory.

When I was eight years old, my father suggested that I read Sholem Aleichem’s Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son. Father himself had been a child in the Galician shtetl of Dynow, just a few miles from Lemberg, otherwise known as Lvov. Like Mottel, he had lost his father at a young age and lived with his brothers and sisters and hardworking widowed mother.

Father, who immigrated to Palestine in 1936, did not talk much about his childhood. Only rarely was the curtain drawn to reveal a strange, enchanting, intangible world, almost like a shadow theater. Then I could see my father as a little boy, sitting in the cheder opposite a stern teacher who used to fix broken china during class, binding the pieces together with wire. I could see Father at the age of four, walking home from the cheder in the dark, lighting his way with a candle stuck inside half a radish—nature’s candlestick. I could see the doctor bringing a precious remedy for my grandfather’s ailment as he lay on his deathbed: a paper-thin slice of watermelon. And I could see my father looking out the window.

Father handed me Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son (in Y.D. Berkowitz’s Hebrew translation), and I read the title of the first chapter while he held the book in his hands—“Today’s a Holiday—Weeping Is Forbidden!”—and then the following words: “I bet no one was so delighted with the warm sunny days following Passover as I, Mottel, the son of Peissi the Cantor, and as the neighbor’s calf, ‘Menie’ (as I, Mottel, have named him).”

I did not understand a word of what I read, and yet there was something there. I took the book from my father’s hands and climbed up onto the windowsill, my favorite reading place. Outside was Beit Mazmil, where the residents were trying to accustom themselves to the neighborhood’s newly ordained Hebrew name, Kiryat Yovel. It was a cluster of apartment buildings whose occupants had made their way from seventy exiles and who argued in seventy languages. The dwellers of the tin-shack neighborhood, whom we called asbestonim, looked on enviously at those who were lucky enough to get a tiny apartment in one of the buildings. There were young couples who confronted life with determined optimism, and Holocaust survivors who walked the streets like shadows and whom we children feared.

“Together we basked in the first warm sunrays of the first mild after-Passover days; together we breathed in the fragrance of the first tender blades of grass that burst through the newly bared earth; and together we crept out of dark narrow prisons to greet the first sunny spring morning. I, son of Peissi the Cantor, emerged from a cold damp cellar which always smells of sour dough and medicines. And Menie, the neighbor’s calf, was released from an even worse odor—a small filthy stall, dark and muddy, with crooked battered walls which let in snow in winter and rain in summer.”

“Do you like it?” my father asked. “Read, read, it’s just how things were with us.” And perhaps because of the expression on his face at that moment, I had a sudden illumination: I realized that for the first time, he was inviting me over there, giving me the keys to the tunnel that would lead from my childhood to his.

It was a peculiar tunnel. One end was in Jerusalem, in the young State of Israel, which believed that its strength depended partly on its ability to forget so that it could cobble together a new identity for itself. And the other end was in the land of Over There.

From the moment I stepped into that land I could not leave. I was eight, and within a few months I had devoured all of Sholem Aleichem’s writings that existed in Hebrew at the time—the children’s stories, the writings for adults, and the plays. When I reread the works before writing this piece, I was amazed to discover how little I could have understood as a child, and how powerfully the things beyond the visible text must have worked on me. Because what could an eight- or nine-year-old have understood about Rachel’s tormented love for Stempenyu? Or the political views that Sholem Aleichem gave to a detached and wayward Jewish character like Menachem Mendel, or to his complete opposite, Tevye the Milkman? What did I know about the life of yeshiva students who ate at the table of a different homeowner each day of the week? About the hostility between the “landlord” class and the workers, or about the conflict between the Zionists and the Bundists?

I did not know, I did not understand, but something inside me would not allow me to let go of the inscrutable stories, written in a Hebrew I had never encountered before. I read like someone entering a completely foreign world that was, at the same time, a promised land. In some sense, I felt that I was coming home. And it all worked its magic on me in a muddled way: the words with the biblical ring, the characters, the customs, the ways of life, and the fact that the page numbers were marked with letters rather than numbers, as in Bialik and Rawnitzky’s Book of Legends. Even the smell of the pages was dense and so different from the scent of the other books I read—translations of The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, The Paul Street Boys and Kajtus´ the Wizard, the works of Erich Kestner and Jules Verne, and Israeli books like Shraga Gafni’s adventure stories, Eliezer Smoli’s Frontiersmen of Israel, the adventures of the secret agent named Oz Yaoz, books by Nachum Gutman, and anything else I could get my hands on.

Parenthetically I will add that I belong to a generation that was accustomed to reading texts in which they did not understand every single word. In the early 1960s we read books in archaic and poetic Hebrew; we read translations from the 1920s and ’30s that did not employ our daily language at all. The incomprehensibility imposed on us was certainly a barrier to fluid reading, but in hindsight I think that part of my reading experience in that period came from this very same incomprehensibility: the mystery and the exoticism of words with an odd ring, and the pleasure of inferring one thing from another. I note this because most children’s books today (and children’s magazines even more so) are written at the readers’ eye level and ear level, if not lower, usually preferring the simplest—and sometimes the most simplistic—words possible, often favoring slang. Of course this has many advantages and perhaps results in a broader readership, yet I miss the reading experience of my own childhood, when in the course of reading, the child would fill in linguistic gaps and unwittingly acquire a large and rich vocabulary, learning to view language as an entity with a life of its own.

**pagebreak next=”I met moneylenders and usurers, and robbers who attack you in the woods at night.”**Inside the six volumes of Sholem Aleichem—a collection of small red books published by Dvir—I discovered the most imaginative world I had ever found in any book. It was a world that was neither heroic nor grand, ostensibly containing nothing that could draw the heart of a child. But it spoke to me, and must have given voice to a longing, a real hunger, that I had not even imagined before. I read about cunning matchmakers, tailors, and water-drawers; about tutors (melamdim) and pupils (dardakim) in the cheder; about priests and laundresses and snuff-takers and smugglers. I read about sheepskin mantles and peasant overcoats. I met moneylenders and usurers, and robbers who attack you in the woods at night. There were places called Kasrilevke and Yehupitz, and people called Hersh Leib, Shneyer, Menachem Mendel, Ivan Pichkur, and Father Alexei. Strangest of all was that Jews lived together with goyim. What did this mean? Why did they want to live with these dangerous goyim? Why did Tevye’s daughter Chavaleh marry a goy? And why did the goyim throw Tevye out of his home, and how was it possible so simply, with the wave of an arm, to uproot a man from his home and his life and tell him, “Go”?

Incidentally, I did not fully comprehend the meaning of the word goy, and the term “Christian” was also a little vague. I am fairly certain that until the age of nine I was positive—perhaps like many children—that “Christian” (in Hebrew, notzri) was a type of Egyptian (in Hebrew, mitzri). Either way, they were both “the enemy.”

Everything in the stories amazed and daunted and attracted me: the sense of a tenuous existence; the suffering embedded in the everyday; the constant fear of pogroms or “hunts”; the fluent dialogue with God, almost like small talk; and the absolute authority of dreams and their meanings. There was also the constant presence of the dead, a series of “patriarchs” and “matriarchs” with whom people conversed on a daily basis even if they had been dead for years. And the experience of total dependence on despots, the fatalism, the physical weakness, the compassion—even toward those who hate you—and the irony, and again and again the peculiar intimacy with calamity, the calamity that always hovered over everyone’s head so that its imminence was never in doubt.

It is worth noting that I did not know any other children who read Sholem Aleichem. When I excitedly told my best friend in the neighborhood about my new experience, he gave me a sideways look and his lips began to curl into a smirk. I quickly changed the subject, but the incident forced me to make increased efforts in such pursuits as suicidal leaps from trees and climbing up tall cranes, all to clear my briefly sullied name. Very quickly, with a child’s instinct—a survivor’s instinct—I realized that the shtetl must remain my secret world, to be shared with no one.

Between the ages of eight and ten I was a double agent from “here” to Over There and back again. I conducted an intensive life in both realities, experiencing with great enthusiasm all that life in Israel of the early 1960s had to offer—a spirited existence that was both miserable and miraculous. Like most children in the neighborhood, I worked tirelessly to expose Arab spies (half the country was busy with that) and spent days in physical training so that I could either make it onto the Israeli team that would defeat the evil Germans or get into the paratroopers. But whenever possible I dived back into my Jewish shtetl, which was becoming more and more tangible, comprehensible, and relevant to me, animating within me some Jewish note—that was at the same time very diasporic—giving it a voice and sensations, and a clear existence in my world.

The odd thing was that all that time I was convinced that the world of Sholem Aleichem—the world of the Eastern European shtetl—continued to exist alongside my own. Not that I dwelled much on the question of its existence or lack thereof in reality: its literary form was so bold and vital that it never even occurred to me to ponder its subsistence outside the pages of the six volumes. But in the recesses of my mind it was clear to me that this world did indeed live on somewhere out there, with its various laws and institutions, its special language, and its mystery. It was a world always accompanied by a sad yet smiling melody, a lamentation resigned to the loss—but the loss of what? That I did not know.

And then when I was about nine and a half, in the midst of a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, one of those clumsy, hackneyed, repetitive rituals that are so helpless in the face of the thing itself, in the face of that unfathomable number, six million . . .

It struck me all at once. Suddenly. The six million, the murdered, the victims, the “Holocaust martyrs,” all those terms were in fact my people. They were Mottel and Tevye and Shimele Soroker and Chavaleh and Stempenyu and Lily and Shimek. On the burning asphalt of the Beit Hakerem school, the shtetl was suddenly taken from me.

It was the first time I truly understood the meaning of the Holocaust. And it is no exaggeration to say that this comprehension shook my entire world. I remember my distress during the following days, a distress characteristic of the children of real survivors, because I imagined that I now bore some responsibility to remember all those people; it was a responsibility I did not want.

Every child has his first experience of death. The characters in Sholem Aleichem’s stories were the first people to die in my life. I could not read about them any longer, yet I could not stop reading. For a while I read in a way I never had: with care and gravity, I read all six volumes again, for the last time (I was very careful not to laugh in the places that always made me laugh), and the reading was both my contact with the intolerable pain and my only way to heal it. Each encounter with the text brought home to me again the enormity of the loss, but somehow also made it a little more tolerable. Today I know that at ten I discovered that books are the place in the world where both the thing and the loss of it can coexist.

The first part of See Under: Love tells of a boy named Momik who tries to understand the Diaspora in Israeli terms. Large parts of the book are an attempt to write about a Jewish existence in an Israeli idiom. But it also attempts the opposite: to describe Israel in a “diasporic” language. That is the book’s internal music, its counterpoint.

See Under: Love is a novel about a story that was lost, torn to shreds. There are several such lost stories in the book, which have to be told again and again because that is the only way to assemble the traces of identity and fuse the fragments of a crumbled world. Many characters in the book are looking for a story they have lost, usually a childhood tale, and they need it very badly so that they can retell it, as adults, and be reborn through it. It is not innocence that drives their desire to tell children’s stories, for they have virtually no innocence left. Rather, this is their way to preserve their humanity, and perhaps a modicum of nobility—to believe in the possibility of childhood in this world, and to hold it up against the sheer cynicism. To tell the whole story again through the eyes of a child.

**pagebreak next=”The arbitrariness of an external force that violently invades the life of one person, one soul, preoccupies me in almost all my books.”**The arbitrariness of an external force that violently invades the life of one person, one soul, preoccupies me in almost all my books. In See Under: Love it was Nazism; in The Smile of the Lamb and The Yellow Wind it was a military occupation that views itself as enlightened, while its victims are subjected to the tyranny of a power they perceive as supreme; in The Book of Intimate Grammar I tried to describe the way one’s soul—that multifarious glimmer of life—is forced to adapt to the impersonal dimensions of matter, to the unequivocal quality of flesh.

From one book to the next I found that if I could be more precise in describing the relationship between the individual soul and this external arbitrariness, if I struggled a little harder with the depth of descriptions, the subtlety of sensations, the nuances of “being there,” I could conquer another millimeter of the void between myself and what had always seemed unalterable. Not that I found a better way to live in peace with the contradictions between body and mind; not that I truly understood how a man can erase himself to such a degree that he becomes part of a destructive machine; and not that if I were to describe the injustices of the Occupation it would be over. But my inner stance vis-à-vis the unalterable shifted slightly: I could give my own private names and definitions to states that had seemed frozen, eternal, monolithic, decreed from above or from below. I was no longer a victim of the things that had theretofore paralyzed me with fear and despair.

This feeling brings me to another precious source of inspiration and awe—the writing of Bruno Schulz. I first heard about The Street of Crocodiles (originally titled Cinnamon Shops) from a stranger who phoned me one day after reading The Smile of the Lamb to tell me, warmly but firmly, that I was of course deeply influenced by Bruno Schulz. As I said, I did not know Schulz’s work at the time, and I was happy to learn how much he had influenced me. In fact, I have frequently been informed by my erudite critics about certain writers who have influenced me, and after reading them for the first time, I have discovered that the critics were correct.

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jewish writer who lived in the town of Drohobycz, also in Galicia, was a modest art teacher who turned his small domestic life into a tremendous mythology, and today he is considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Bruno Schulz believed and hoped that our daily life was but a series of legendary episodes, fragments of ancient carved images, crumbs of shattered mythologies. He likened human language to a primeval snake that was long ago cut into a thousand pieces—these pieces are the words that have ostensibly lost their primeval vitality and now function solely as a means of communication, yet still, always, they continue “to search for one another in the dark.”

On every page written by Bruno Schulz one can feel this restless search, the longing for a different, primordial wholeness. His stories are full of the moments of first contact, when words suddenly “find one another in the dark.” That is when an electric spark of sorts occurs in the reader’s consciousness, awakening the sense that a word he or she has heard and read a thousand times can now momentarily reveal its private name.

Only two collections of Schulz’s short stories have been published, as well as a few other shorter works. He wrote a novel titled The Messiah, which was lost, and no one knows for certain what it contained. I once met a man who told me that Schulz had shown him the first few lines of the novel: Morning rises above a town. A certain light. Towers. That was all he saw.

Although Schulz did not write much, life bursts forth from every page he did produce, overflowing, becoming worthy of its name, a colossal effort that occurs simultaneously on all levels of consciousness and unconsciousness, illusion and nostalgia and nightmare. I read the book over the course of one day and night in a total frenzy of the senses, and my feeling—which now slightly embarrasses me—will be familiar to anyone who has been in love: it was the knowledge that this other person or thing was meant only for me.

I read the entire book (Cinnamon Shops & Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, published in Hebrew by Schocken) without knowing a thing about Bruno Schulz, and when I reached the end, I read Yoram Bronowski’s afterword, where I learned the story of Schulz’s death. In the Drohobycz ghetto, Schulz had a protector and employer in the form of an S.S. officer named Landau, who had Schulz paint murals in his home and stable. The officer had a rival, another S.S. officer named Günter, who lost a card game to Landau. Günter met Bruno Schulz on a street corner and shot him dead to hurt his employer. When the two officers later met, the murderer said: “I killed your Jew.” To which the other responded: “Very well. Now I will kill your Jew.”

After reading this account, I felt that I did not wish to live in a world in which such monstrosities of language could be uttered. But this time, unlike my paralysis at age ten—after realizing the connection between the horrors of the Holocaust and the characters of Sholem Aleichem—I had a way to express what I felt. I wanted to write a book that would tell readers about Bruno Schulz. It would be a book that would tremble on the shelf. The vitality it contained would be tantamount to the blink of an eye in one person’s life—not “life” in quotation marks, life that is nothing more than a languishing moment in time, but the sort of life Schulz gives us in his writing. A life of the living.

I know that many readers of See Under: Love found it difficult to get through the chapter on Bruno Schulz. But for me, that is the core of the book, the reason I wrote it, the reason I write. When people tell me they were unable to read it, I am regretful over the missed encounter, which is why the meetings I have had with those who were willing to delve into that chapter with me are so precious. The book has since been translated into several languages, and nothing makes me happier than the fact that in each language in which the book has appeared, new editions of Bruno Schulz’s writings have soon followed, and more and more people have become acquainted with this wonderful writer.

When I was invited to write about my sources of inspiration, I was asked which books I would like to discuss and what should be included in the bibliography for students. I began to think about which books and writers have influenced me and shaped my writing, and there have been so many: the stories of A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz’s Hill of Evil Counsel, Kafka’s works, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, Heinrich Böll, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Of course I was tempted to lecture about Joyce and Camus, of whom I am particularly fond, and to frustrate some of the distinguished scholars with quotations from a Greenlandic epic they have never heard of.

But when Bialik wrote his poem “My Song,” he did not speak of his literary sources of inspiration. That was not the poem in which he described the bookshelves he stood facing as a boy, and later left behind. “Do you know whence I derived my song?” he asks. And he replies by recalling the dry, empty voice of a cricket that lived in his father’s house, and his mother’s deep sigh when she was widowed.

A cricket, a sigh.

And so I will not speak of authors or books that inspired me, but of an almost physical sensation that may not be a source of inspiration in the traditional sense, yet I feel it is a distinct root of my need to write. I find it difficult to reduce this sensation to a verbal definition. Bruno Schulz talks of suffocation within “the fortressed walls of tedium that close in on us”; perhaps it is that suffocation. Perhaps it is a type of claustrophobia that arises within the words of others. To understand it, I wrote a whole book, The Book of Intimate Grammar, which is the story of a young man who cannot accept the burden of all the conventions and routines that surround him, or the verbal clichés, or even the restrictive, unequivocal, physical dictates of his own body.

**pagebreak next=”Aron Kleinfeld lives in what is essentially a society of refugees.”**The book takes place in 1960s Jerusalem. Aron Kleinfeld lives in what is essentially a society of refugees, filled with people who have recently escaped a catastrophe and are trying with their last remaining strength to create a new life, a new language. With sometimes grotesque fervor, they grasp onto objects, food, anything with tangible volume. They create a solid, corporeal, unequivocal world, and it is naturally a world that is extremely belligerent and arbitrary, recklessly invading the privacy of its individuals.

To me, it is a book about the birth of an artist from within those “fortressed walls of tedium.” Aron, who is twelve when the story begins, a bright and imaginative child with abundant happiness, feels this invasion increasingly stifling him. It is all around him, shoving rude fingers into his mind and body. Even the physiological process of maturation that he faces seems to be a part of it. (Incidentally, the Hebrew words for “muscle”—shrir—and “arbitrariness”—shrirut—come from the same root.)

Alienation and, ultimately, hostility emerge between Aron and his own flesh and body—between himself and the part of his being that has an external, objective, yet extremely internal existence. Aron sees his friends begin to mature and change, as if collectively obeying an invisible order, and he is incapable of joining them. There is something in the unity of the process, in its inevitability, that deters him because he finds it lacking in freedom, almost humiliating.

Aron’s case is of course an extreme one, but I imagine we all remember the feelings of our adolescence, when we entered a tunnel that would stretch out for a number of years without knowing what fate had in store for us, how we would emerge at the other end, woven into which body, woven into which soul. As the years go by, we come to know the thing that Aron feared most, unknowingly of course, and which probably made him refuse to accept this constitution of the flesh: the knowledge of how easy it is for the mind to surrender to the corporeal dimension and gradually become a mechanism much like that of the body—with clogged arteries, cramped muscles, rigid joints, and automatic reflexes.

Faced with the bureaucracy of the body imposed on him, Aron feels that the primary means through which he can express his freedom, his uniqueness, and even his sexuality is language. And since language is also a kind of body, with a dual existence, both inside and out, Aron is tormented every time there is a grating contact between that “inside” and that “outside”: when people around him use language like old saws, when they belittle something that in Aron’s soul has a different, purer, more loyal existence. From that particular moment he realizes instinctively that he can no longer use words as others do—indiscriminately, indifferently, inarticulately.

It is also relevant to note that the story occurs shortly before the Six-Day War, when everyone Aron meets talks in the same blunt, military style, born of fear and arrogance. They all prophesize in the same tone, and this depresses Aron to no end, both because of the crudeness that characterizes the uniform, slogan-ridden discourse and because of his sense that they all belong to a secret, hermetic system of symbols from which he himself is removed, and that he will never have the requisite crudeness or obtuseness to become a part of it.

Deep within himself, beneath his heart, Aron establishes a hospital for sick words, where he employs complex rituals to heal and purify the words he gathers from the day-to-day. Only when the purification process is complete does he feel entitled to use the words. They have passed through his body and soul. They are his. Of course this process condemns Aron to utter solitude, trapped in his inner world, in his own private language, creating his beloved and his best friend inside himself, unable to maintain normal relationships with them in what is termed “reality.” The book ends when Aron shuts himself up inside an old refrigerator and hopes that with the help of the childlike, artistic spark he used to have, he will be able to pull off his most difficult Houdini trick and break out of the refrigerator into the world. But will he in fact be able to?

I have my own answer to this question, but before I reach it I would like to shift from the private, personal language to the more general kind, which served as a sort of “inspiration in reverse” for three of my books: the novel The Smile of the Lamb and two works of nonfiction, The Yellow Wind and Sleeping on a Wire. Each of these books, in its own way, tries to describe contemporary political reality in a language that is not the public, general, nationalized idiom.

To our great misfortune, we in Israel have been living for almost a century in a state of violent conflict, which has an enormous influence on all realms of life, including, of course, on language. When a country or a society finds itself—no matter for what reasons—in a prolonged state of incongruity between its founding values and its political circumstances, a rift can emerge between the society and its identity, between the society and its “inner voice.” The more complex and contradictory the situation becomes and the more the society has to compromise in order to contain all its disparities, the more it creates a different system for itself, an ad hoc system of norms, of “emergency values,” keeping double books of its identity.

I am not saying anything new here. Those who live in such a reality, as we do in Israel, will find it easy to understand how fears consolidate ideals around themselves, how needs become values, and how a subjective world-view and a self-image that is wholly unsuited to reality can materialize. A special kind of language then begins to emerge, one that is usually a manipulation on the part of those who wish to prolong the distorted situation. It is a language of words intended not to describe reality but to obfuscate it, to allay it. It depicts a reality that does not exist, an imaginary state constructed by wishful thinking, while large and complex elements of the actual reality remain wordless, in the hope that they will somehow fade away and vanish. In such conditions one of our most dubious talents arises: the talent for passivity, for self-erasure, for reducing the inner surface of our soul lest it get hurt. In other words, the talent for being a victim.

Let us go back eleven years, to the spring of 1987.

For two decades, as a result of the Six-Day War, Israel has controlled more than two million Palestinians. By all opinions this is a grave state of affairs, yet it turns out that most Israelis, as well as most Palestinians, have taught themselves how to live in these warped circumstances and that many of them believe the situation will never change. As time goes by, there is an increasing perception of a “status quo,” along with more and more arguments that justify and even sanctify this very status quo. The press provides scarcely any news of what is going on in the Territories, only brief reports of violent incidents phrased in fixed formulas that are little more than slogans and do not catch one’s eye for very long.

At this time I was working as a newscaster on the Kol Israel radio news. I was given dozens, if not hundreds, of items to read that sounded something like this: “A local youth was killed during disturbances in the Territories.” Notice the shrewdness of the sentence: “disturbances”—as if there were some order or normative state in the Territories that was briefly disturbed; “in the Territories”—we would never expressly say “the Occupied Territories”; “youth”—this youth might have been a three-year-old boy, and of course he never had a name; “local”—so as not to say “Palestinian,” which would imply someone with a clear national identity; and above all, note the verb “was killed”—no one killed him. It would have been almost intolerable to admit that our hands spilled this blood, and so he “was killed.” (Sometimes the passive voice is the last refuge of the patriot.)

Because we lost the capacity to use the right words to describe reality, we woke up one day, in December 1987, to a reality that is difficult to describe. Israel had deceived itself so efficiently that the Israel Defense Forces did not even have contingency plans to deal with the mass protests. At the beginning of the intifada the security apparatus dispatched urgent envoys to the world’s most dubious markets to purchase rubber bullets, gravel-spraying vehicles, and other necessities. Yet any country that occupies and oppresses another people must be prepared for such large-scale demonstrations. Israel was not prepared, because it did not know it was an occupier, it did not think it was an oppressor, and it did not tell itself that there was a people out there.

Nine months before the intifada broke out, I wrote The Yellow Wind. The book presented nothing new in the way of facts, which had been exposed ad nauseam. But in order to truly understand what I was seeing and feeling, I had to articulate the facts with new words. And from the moment I started writing, from the day I went to the Dheisheh refugee camp and encountered a reality that until that time I had lacked the words to describe, I felt something I had not felt for years, certainly not in the political context: that consciousness, in any situation, is always free to choose to face reality in a different, new way. That writing about reality is the simplest way to not be a victim.

In this sense, writing the nonfiction books made me feel that I was reclaiming parts of myself that the prolonged conflict had expropriated or turned into “closed military zones.” Furthermore, I came to grasp the high price we were paying for willingly giving up on parts of our soul—a price no less painful than giving up land. I knew that we were not killing only the Palestinians, and I asked why we were continuing to accept not just the murder, but the suicide too.

The name of the novel Be My Knife is a paraphrase of a line Franz Kafka wrote to Milena: “Love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself.” The Book of Intimate Grammar could not have been written without See Under: Love, which preceded it; Be My Knife could not have been written without The Book of Intimate Grammar; and Be My Knife, in turn, was probably the basis for the book that followed it. It is clear to me now that this is a very long path, which must be followed slowly, and that I must recognize that an entire lifetime will not suffice to map out even the first bend in the path.

In The Book of Intimate Grammar, I articulated several complicated ideas that I needed to understand, in sentences that today cover the pages in front of me like a verdict. But they are precisely what enabled me to find the strength to step out of Aron Kleinfeld’s loneliness, to escape from the refrigerator at the end of that book and start walking—this time in a different literary situation, with a different, more mature literary character—toward a different person. This would no longer be the imaginary creation of my protagonist, but a man who lives in reality and a woman of flesh and blood. I had to believe that it is possible for a different person to occur within myself, to believe without fear that a person can dwell inside the body and soul and language of another. And to discover that one can find a partner to share the deepest and most silent anxieties, and keys to unlock the most despicable self-laid traps.

Be My Knife is also the story of a journey to find the right language. A journey in which the woman is a tour guide of sorts who leads the man to his real language, which she carves out of him in a difficult battle until, near the end of the book, they create their own language. The book tries to be the only place where there can be a meaning for this private language—the language of their love.

Excerpted from Writing in the Dark by David Grossman (translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen), published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright© 2008 by David Grossman. Translation copyright © 2008 by Jessica Cohen. All rights reserved.

Before A Tale of Love and Darkness, you wrote The Same Sea, a prose poem, difficult and most unusual. Did it open the door to the memory of your parents?

The Same Sea was structured like a madrigal, an assembly of voices. A Tale of Love and Darkness is more like a broad symphony. I don’t think one of them opened the door for the other, because the memories are with me all the time, and because neither of those books is based entirely on memory. Both contain a combination of memory and invention and playfulness and imagination and exaggeration. But for me, the time has come to write about my own childhood in a very detached way. Not with anger, not with revenge, but to write about my parents as if they were my children, about my grandparents as if they were my grandchildren. I could only write A Tale of Love and Darkness when I reached a point where I felt that I was past anger, frustration, revenge, or even bewilderment. I could write with a smile, or perhaps with a combination of a smile and a tear. I could write with irony and compassion about times that had gone, people who are no longer here, and I wrote it not in order to put the blame on someone but in order to save what I could save from the river of time.

Would you say that this book sprouts from the seed of the authentic past?

If you mean authentic in the sense of a police report, then my book is not authentic. It is full of invention, it’s full of imagination, it’s full of reconstruction from my head and from my genes. But I tried to capture or sometimes recreate atmospheres of bygone times, of decades which now look as if they are centuries ago. Of people who now look as if they lived in a different eon. I tried to make them present. I try to present them as if my reader can be in the same room with them, can be sometimes in the same bed with them, can be sometimes in the same emotional condition with them.

Your new book takes place mostly in Jerusalem, but Eastern Europe, where your parents came from, remains in the background at all times. How was the connection between Jerusalem and Europe then, and what is it today, say, between your home in Arad and Europe?

My parents and my grandparents were very devoted Europeans. I am not a European. I don’t see myself as an European. But they were. In the 1920s or 1930s, everyone was a Bulgarian patriot, or a Norwegian patriot, or a Polish patriot. The only Europeans in Europe at that time were Jews like my parents, for which Europe hated them, persecuted them, and labeled them cosmopolitans. There were three pejorative terms that the Nazis shared with the Communists: cosmopolitan, parasite, intelligent. All three labels stick to my family, because they were precisely this. They were not Polish or Russian, they were great lovers of Europe. And they were violently kicked out of Europe, despite their love—and fortunately, because if Europe would not have kicked them out in the 1930s, it would have killed them in the 1940s.

So in a sense I am the child of people who experienced a rejected love of Europe. I grew up in the shadow of their emotional injury. My parents, my grandparents, they were not the people who drowned with the Titanic in the big, big catastrophe, no, they were the people who were thrown into the ocean in the dark, from the decks of the Titanic, while the dancing and the dining and the ball was still going on and everybody was happy. They never recovered from it. They created a mini-Europe in a tiny little basement of an apartment, filled with books in 17 different European languages, they dreamed about Europe. They loved the landscapes, the atmosphere, the art, the history, the literature, and, above all, the music. Oh, they worshipped the music! And yet, they were very careful not to teach me even one European language, because they were afraid that if I had a European language, I might be seduced by the deadly charm of Europe and catch my death.

I still find in me this strange combination of fascination and anger which I inherited from my ancestors. It is not only anger about the past, to some extent it is also anger about the relentless hypocrisy and self-righteousness of Europeans concerning world affairs.

What do you mean?

I don’t think that the policy of wagging fingers—at the Arabs or at the Israelis or at the Americans or at the Iraqis—is a great blessing. I think Europe ought to be much more directly responsible and helpful in world affairs, and much less moralizing and telling others how they ought and ought not to behave. Europe could have been a lot more helpful than it is in many, many troubled parts of the world.

Kerem Avraham, the Jerusalem neighborhood where you grew up, is now completely Orthodox. What do you think about on your walks there?

I don’t have the slightest problem with the fact that places change. The Kerem Avraham of my life is in my book, not where you have gone for a walk. It’s in my memory, and it’s in my descriptions, just like those shtetls in Eastern Europe where my parents came from. They no longer exist, and yet they do exist in the collective memories of those who came from there. So no, I am not going to lament the fact that my world is gone. It’s not gone, it’s elsewhere.

Your new book is not only the tragic story of your parents but also of your personal development, from, as you write, a 9-year-old Zionist propagandist under the sway of his great uncle Joseph Klausner, to a minimalist Zionist, as you call yourself today. How did your viewpoint change?

You said my book is sad and tragic and this is true, but it is meant to be a tragicomedy. I wanted to erase the line between the tragedy and the comedy. These are not two different planets; these are just two different windows through which we can watch the same landscape. And I wrote this tale deliberately in such a form that it will be both funny and heartbreaking, not on different pages but sometimes in the same episodes.

To some extent, this is also the answer to your question. Of course I was a little militant, like every child one way or another, in my case nationalistic. Some other children are militant about the Internet or militant about Star Wars or militant about whatever. For me, the key to maturity is the realization of the existence of others and the ability to imagine the others. As soon as I internalized the fact that we Israeli Jews are not alone in this country, there are others, I had to rearrange my thoughts and my feelings. The moment I realized that some Israeli Jews are going to be ultra-Orthodox and others are not, I had to rearrange my thoughts and ask myself, how can we coexist? Not happily, not without tensions, not in a state of perpetual honeymoon. But how can we reach a situation where we stop killing one another and start living unhappily next door to one another? This to me is the syndrome of maturity. Anyone who grows up thinking that he or she is alone in the world or alone in the house or alone in the country meaning everyone else must be like me, every such person is a very dangerous person. So for me it was linked with my artistic development or my discovery of my own personality as a young writer, as a young artist. Others exist, and I am more curious than angry about those others. Not necessarily because I love them, I am just curious. Curiosity cured me of my fanaticism, humor cured me from my fanaticism. Curiosity and humor are powerful antidotes to dogmatism.

You write that, as a child, you always wanted to be a book and not a writer. Why?

It’s not just that I was surrounded by books and raised in a bookish atmosphere. It was fear. I grew up in the shadow of a dreadful genocide, and the shadow of an impending next possible genocide for my people here in this country. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever grow up to live. And then I thought that books have a better chance to survive than people. You can kill a person, you can burn a book. But if you burn a book, some copy may survive in some far away library in Brazil or in Korea or in Australia. So I wanted to be a book for my safety. I am very glad I am not a book. I don’t want to be a book. I want to write books, yes, I want to read books, yes, I love books. But I don’t want to be a book. I want to live.