To the End of the Land
Read To the End of the Land Online
Authors: David Grossman
Praise for David Grossman’s
TO THE END OF THE LAND
“A tour de force.… Unforgettable.… [Grossman’s] best.”
—
The Star-Ledger
“Penetrating.… Grossman has produced a sprawling novel that stretches over nearly 35 years of Israeli history. Along with war and peace, life and death, Grossman reckons with the emotional and sexual geometry of Israelis, particularly the secular liberals now in middle age, much like their author.”
—
Newsday
“This is a story of love and friendship, family and society, parents and children, life and death. And war and peace.… Whether lushly descriptive, emotive or narrative, Grossman’s writing is both controlled and passionate.… Ora’s voice is authentic and true, honed to perfection.”
—
Chicago Jewish Star
“Profound.… A reminder of what Israel—what any country—is capable of doing to its sons.”
—
The Boston Globe
“There are some writers in whose words one recognizes the texture of life. David Grossman is such a writer. He is a master of the emotionally accurate and significant. His characters don’t so much lie on the page as rise before the reader’s eyes, in three dimensions, their skin covered in prose that both stabs with insight and shines with compassion.”
—Yann Martel, author of
Life of Pi
“Moving.… A convincing portrait of maternal grit and ingenuity in a time and place of relentless challenge.… In this powerful book, there are surprising answers of a kind, but the ongoing strife goes on.”
—
The Washington Times
“Very rarely you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling has opened in you that was not there before. David Grossman has the ability to look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity; his novels are about what it means to defend this essence against a world designed to extinguish it.
To the End of the Land
is his most powerful, unflinching story of this defense.”
—Nicole Krauss, author of
The History of Love
“Unforgettable.… The unstudied beauty and psychological complexity of Grossman’s language, his deft and lively dialogue, are utterly compelling.… Rendered in Jessica Cohen’s exquisite translation, Grossman’s symphonic novel straddles despair and hope, a journey into inner and outer landscapes, delivering stunning rewards.”
—
The Miami Herald
“Grossman invites us to look beneath the shrill headlines, beyond the roadblocks, within the clenched fist—to see Israel’s predicament not as ‘the situation’ but as many situations, one for every person.”
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The Washington Post
“A courageous and powerful antiwar novel.”
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Kansas City Star
“Grossman’s most ambitious work to date.… His imagination is secular, worldly, self-questioning and ironic. The Israel he imagines, beautifully and sorrowfully, is not going to be saved by any divine intervention.”
—
The Economist
“Bold and uncompromising, this great emotional rush of a story sings and cries, exults and mourns.”
—
The Forward
“An extraordinary epic of love, war, and sorrow.… Stunning—brilliantly written and beautifully constructed.”
—
The Times
(London)
“A deeply serious, utterly honest work about the state of Israel.”
—
Financial Times
David Grossman
TO THE END OF THE LAND
David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. His work has appeared in
The New Yorker
and has been translated into thirty-six languages around the world. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome’s Premio per la Pace e l’Azione Umitaria, the Premio Ischia—International Award for Journalism, Israel’s Emet Prize, and the Albatross Prize given by the Günter Grass Foundation.
Also by David Grossman
FICTION
In Another Life
Someone to Run With
Be My Knife
The Zigzag Kid
The Book of Intimate Grammar
See Under: Love
The Smile of the Lamb
NONFICTION
Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics
Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo
Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel
The Yellow Wind
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2011
Translation copyright © 2010 by Jessica Cohen
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Israel as
Isha Borachat Me’besurah
by HaKibbutz HaMeuchad Publishing House, Ltd., Tel Aviv, in 2008. Copyright © 2008 by David Grossman and HaKibbutz HaMeuchad Publishing House, Ltd. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to ACUM for permission to reprint lyrics from “Dudu,” words by Haim Heffer, and “Mispad,” words by Moshe Tabenkin. Copyright © by the authors and ACUM. All rights reserved.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Grossman, David.
[Ishah borahat mi-besorah. English]
To the end of the land / by David Grossman ; translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
I. Cohen, Jessica. II. Title.
PJ5054.G728I8413 2010
892.4′36—dc22 2010003915
eISBN: 978-0-307-59434-1
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson
Cover photograph © Martin Ward/Wildcard Images/Glasshouse Images
v3.1_r1
For Michal
For Yonatan and Ruthi
For Uri, 1985–2006
Contents
Prologue, 1967
HEY, GIRL,
quiet!
Who is that?
Be quiet! You woke everyone up!
But I was holding her
Who?
On the rock, we were sitting together
What rock are you talking about? Let us sleep
Then she just fell
All this shouting and singing
But I was asleep
And you were shouting!
She just let go of my hand and fell
Stop it, go to sleep
Turn on a light
Are you crazy? They’ll kill us if we do that
Wait
What?
I was singing?
Singing, shouting, everything. Now be quiet
What was I singing?
What were you singing?!
In my sleep, what was I singing?