Writing in the Dark
Read Writing in the Dark Online
Authors: David Grossman
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).”
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 tinshack 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.
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 tinshack 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.”
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.
“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.
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 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
Kajtu
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.
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
Kajtu
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.
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.
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”?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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