there are only three israeli writers i’ve read, david grossman, amoz oz, and a. b. yehoshua. on august 11 they appeared at a joint press conference to call for peace with lebanon. two days later, grossman’s son, 20, was killed in lebanon while serving in the army. it was 48 hours to the official cease fire. the death of this boy has struck me deeply. our writers, the writers we love, are the voices of our imaginary and often our souls. those we really love, we are capable of loving more than we love our friends. they become soulmates in a way that is magically free of the constraints of time and space and the demands of everyday life (this is why, if you love a writer very much, you don’t want to meet her). the quality of this love is platonic to the highest degree, in the best possible sense. i love these three men. i love their novels. i am moved by their lifelong fight for justice in israel and palestine. here’s grossman’s eulogy for his son as translated by the guardian.
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Gio, it is a touching, oddly public eulogy, but it is also frustratingly apolitical and stubbornly sentimental. I can’t help but read this and then remind myself of the horrific destruction of Beirut over the last five weeks or so and it simply makes me angry. Angry at Israel, angry at American foreign policy in the Middle East, angry at the UN’s inability to do anything, angry at my own apathetic, cynical response to it all. I’m sorry Uri died in this war, but it doesn’t make him special. He’s simply a statistic with a famous dad.
yeah, jeff, well, i cannot say i wasn’t expecting this response, which i tried, consciously or unconsciously i cannot quite say, to anticipate with my paean to “the writer.” one would be tempted to say that one’s beloved son’s funeral is not the place to do politics, if the images of palestinians and lebanese crows bearing coffins aloft were not so present to one’s eye. it is a horrible war, and i too am angry (in the first two or three weeks i couldn’t sleep i was so angry; then i got used to it, as one does). i could say that i love david grossman and that the death of this leftist boy, son of a leftist guy on the wrong side of the war (in many ways) touched me tremendously, plus the eulogy is a good text unto itself. but this would be paltry, so i’m not going to say it.
One could be tempted to say that one’s beloved son’s funeral is not the place to do politics, except when said eulogy is translated into English and splashed onto the pages of The Guardian (yikes, I sound all Republican OR maybe a member of Vanessa Redgrave’s inner-circle). I’m being reactionary and trodding all over your emotionally resonant response to this very sad death of someone whose father’s work you admire (so for that I do apologize). I tried to read a novel by Grossman once but couldn’t get through it; I wonder if my response would have been different if I did love his work. Is it really possible that the artists we love are somehow more important to our sense of self identity and the way(s) we engage the world than the mundane humans we interact with on a daily basis? Are the stories we surround ourselves with more dear than life itself?
I wouldn’t mind having a beer with Harold Pinter or a chat with Don DeLillo. I’m a bit leery of this metaphysical approach to writers–I don’t find them to be more important than real friends, mundane life or life itself—rather I find them to be bound up in those things, and the best writers I know connect themselves to the mundane in ways that may allow a transcendance of it, but not a rejection, if that makes sense. The best story about the pitfalls of idealizing writers and neglecting the mundane is by a great writer who strangely gets accused of being “above it all”–Henry James’ The Aspern Papers.
but regarding the eulogy, I had a mixed reaction to it, not knowing the work of David Grossman. I wondered what reckoning Israel would come to, and I wondered about the strange tension in a “leftie” who nevertheless participated as a tank commander in the rather brutal invasion of a sovereign country where many civilians were killed, none of their deaths probably receiving the same public mourning as this one. There’s a strange emphasis on the zeal Uri had for becoming a tank commander and for representing Israel in some kind of symbolic way. This symbolism is a bit of a problem when it involves excessive military action. In short, the whole thing seemed to me, as to Jeff, peculiarly self-absorbed—but I suspect that’s the way things would look to the parent of a soldier, and this death, too, is tragic especially in that it need never have happened.
I have a feeling that Grossman’s eulogy–and Grossman himself–do not translate so effectively. It surely is worth examining how or why it got splashed on the pages of The Guardian, yet I think Grossman sells (and is known) far better there than here. The point I would make is that when this writer stands up and mourns, without a specific political objective defined in the text, the local (and perhaps, more broadly outside Israel’s borders, the informed) audience will see that “absence” as starkly resonant of his longstanding political views as well.
I was trying to think of an American equivalent, some way to draw out through analogy how Grossman’s eulogy might in fact be utterly embedded in his politics. But it’s hard–our writers seem already disconnected from explicit political opinions. Instead, we get celebrities; I guess imagine if Jane Fonda’s son died in Vietnam, and she gave a heartfelt speech about the family’s grief and carrying on, trying not to lose her sense of that unbearable loss (the son) through an antiwar rhetoric that might distract from or displace the centrality of the son’s death.
I guess I read it simply as heartfelt, and, knowing the speaker, heard the unspoken. But I am admittedly a fan of Grossman and Oz (‘though I bet I’ve read fewer texts than Gio).
As to writers and our selves, well… I connect with novels in what may seem a terrible over-investment of self, but I’m generally uninterested in authors, beyond some gossipy itch which I don’t mind scratching now and again. Oh, interesting: Pynchon’s a recluse, and pictures of him seem cool. But, like Michael, the desire to maybe have a beer or a conversation is all I get–cathexis only comes through textual engagement. Now, whether that textual energy is escapist or more closely imbricated in the mundane is still up for debate.
yehoshua is the one of the three of whom i’m fondest. the liberated bride and the lover are amazing, dazzling, category-shattering masterpieces. mr. mani is a classic. i wholeheartedly recommend him.
i have amos oz’s a tale of love and darkness, his recently published autobiography, and if anyone is interested i’ll be happy to give it to him (her?). unlike y’all, i don’t like accumulating books and i’m constantly trying to find good homes for them! plus, i’m really happy to find new uses for “the snail” in these fast, fast times. yours for the asking!
Hey guys check out this new website celebmemorial.com In memory all the celebrities that died it’s got videos and stuff really nice!