Writing in the Dark (7 page)
Read Writing in the Dark Online
Authors: David Grossman
I write the life of my country, Israel.
A tortured country, drugged to the point of overdose by history, by emotions beyond what humans can contain, by an extreme excess of events and tragedy, by an excess of fear and a crippling sobriety, by an excess of memory, by dashed
hopes, by a fate unique among nations.
It is an existence that sometimes seems to take on the proportions of a mythic tale, diminishing our prospects of ever living an ordinary life as a state.
A tortured country, drugged to the point of overdose by history, by emotions beyond what humans can contain, by an extreme excess of events and tragedy, by an excess of fear and a crippling sobriety, by an excess of memory, by dashed
hopes, by a fate unique among nations.
It is an existence that sometimes seems to take on the proportions of a mythic tale, diminishing our prospects of ever living an ordinary life as a state.
We authors know periods of despair and self-loathing.
Our work, fundamentally, entails dismantling personalities and relinquishing some of our most effective defense mechanisms.
Willingly we struggle with the hardest, ugliest, rawest, and most painful matters of the soul.
Our work forces us, again and again, to acknowledge our helplessness as people and as artists.
Our work, fundamentally, entails dismantling personalities and relinquishing some of our most effective defense mechanisms.
Willingly we struggle with the hardest, ugliest, rawest, and most painful matters of the soul.
Our work forces us, again and again, to acknowledge our helplessness as people and as artists.
Yet still—and this is the great miracle, the alchemy of our act—in some sense, from the moment we take pen in hand or put fingers to keyboard, we have already ceased to be a victim at the mercy of all that enslaved and restricted us before we began writing.
We write.
How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us.
The world does not grow smaller.
How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us.
The world does not grow smaller.
The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, New York, April 24, 2007
To open the International Literature Festival Berlin as an Israeli author is not only a great honor, but also a conjuncture that would have been unthinkable until not so many years ago, and even today I cannot be indifferent to its significance.
Despite the close relationship between Israel and Germany today—and between Israelis and Germans, between Jews and Germans—even now there is a place in one’s mind and in one’s heart where certain statements must be filtered through the prisms of time and memory to be refracted into the entire spectrum of colors and shades.
As I stand here before you in Berlin, I cannot help but begin with the thoughts that are constantly refracted within me, in that prism of time and memory.
As I stand here before you in Berlin, I cannot help but begin with the thoughts that are constantly refracted within me, in that prism of time and memory.
I was born and raised in Jerusalem, in a neighborhood and in a family in which people could not even utter the word “Germany.” They found it difficult to say “Holocaust” too, and spoke only of “what happened
over there.
”
over there.
”
It is interesting to note that in Hebrew, Yiddish, and every other language they speak, when Jewish people refer to the Holocaust, they tend to talk about “what happened
over there
,” whereas non-Jews usually speak in terms of “what happened
then
.” There is a vast difference between “there” and “then.” “Then” means in the past tense; “then” enfolds within it something that happened and ended, and is no longer.
While “there,” conversely, suggests that somewhere out there, in the distance, the thing that happened is still occurring, constantly growing stronger alongside our daily lives, and that it may re-erupt.
It is not decisively over.
Certainly not for us, the Jews.
over there
,” whereas non-Jews usually speak in terms of “what happened
then
.” There is a vast difference between “there” and “then.” “Then” means in the past tense; “then” enfolds within it something that happened and ended, and is no longer.
While “there,” conversely, suggests that somewhere out there, in the distance, the thing that happened is still occurring, constantly growing stronger alongside our daily lives, and that it may re-erupt.
It is not decisively over.
Certainly not for us, the Jews.
As a child, I often heard the term “the Nazi beast,” and when I asked the adults who this beast was, they refused to tell me, and said there were things a child should not know.
Years later, I wrote in
See Under: Love
about Momik, the son of Holocaust survivors who never tell him what really happened to them “Over There.” The frightened Momik imagines the Nazi beast as a monster that controlled a land called “Over There,” where it tortured the people Momik loves and did things to them that hurt them forever and denied them the ability to live a full life.
Years later, I wrote in
See Under: Love
about Momik, the son of Holocaust survivors who never tell him what really happened to them “Over There.” The frightened Momik imagines the Nazi beast as a monster that controlled a land called “Over There,” where it tortured the people Momik loves and did things to them that hurt them forever and denied them the ability to live a full life.
When I was four or five, I heard for the first time of Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter.
I felt a great sense of relief: Finally, I thought, there is someone courageous enough to fight the beast, even willing to hunt it down!
Had I known how to write at the time, I might have written
Wiesenthal a letter full of the detailed and practical questions that were preoccupying me, because I imagined that this hunter probably knew everything about his prey.
I felt a great sense of relief: Finally, I thought, there is someone courageous enough to fight the beast, even willing to hunt it down!
Had I known how to write at the time, I might have written
Wiesenthal a letter full of the detailed and practical questions that were preoccupying me, because I imagined that this hunter probably knew everything about his prey.
My generation, the children of the early 1950s in Israel, lived in a thick and densely populated silence.
In my neighborhood, people screamed every night from their nightmares.
More than once, when we walked into a room where adults were telling stories of the war, the conversation stopped immediately.
We did pick up the occasional fragment: “The last time I saw him was on Himmelstrasse in Treblinka,” or, “She lost both her children in the first
Aktion
.”
In my neighborhood, people screamed every night from their nightmares.
More than once, when we walked into a room where adults were telling stories of the war, the conversation stopped immediately.
We did pick up the occasional fragment: “The last time I saw him was on Himmelstrasse in Treblinka,” or, “She lost both her children in the first
Aktion
.”
Every day, at twenty minutes past one, there was a ten-minute program on the radio in which a female announcer with a glum and rhythmic voice read the names of people searching for relatives lost during the war and in the Holocaust:
Rachel, daughter of Perla and Abraham Seligson from Przemy
l, is looking for her little sister Leah’leh, who lived in Warsaw between the years … Eliyahu Frumkin, son of Yocheved and Hershl Frumkin from Stry, is looking for his wife, Elisheva, née Eichel, and his two sons, Yaakov and Meir …
And so on and so forth.
Every lunch of my childhood was spent listening to the sounds of this quiet lament.
Rachel, daughter of Perla and Abraham Seligson from Przemy
l, is looking for her little sister Leah’leh, who lived in Warsaw between the years … Eliyahu Frumkin, son of Yocheved and Hershl Frumkin from Stry, is looking for his wife, Elisheva, née Eichel, and his two sons, Yaakov and Meir …And so on and so forth.
Every lunch of my childhood was spent listening to the sounds of this quiet lament.
When I was seven, the Eichmann trial was held in Jerusalem, and then we listened to the radio during dinner when they broadcast descriptions of the horrors.
You could say that my generation lost its appetite, but
there was another loss too.
It was the loss of something deeper, which we did not understand at the time, of course, and which is still being deciphered throughout the course of our lives.
Perhaps what we lost was the illusion of our parents’ power to protect us from the terrors of life.
Or perhaps we lost our faith in the possibility that we, the Jews, would ever live a complete, secure life, like all other nations.
And perhaps, above all, we felt the loss of the natural, childlike faith—faith in man, in his kindness, in his compassion.
You could say that my generation lost its appetite, but
there was another loss too.
It was the loss of something deeper, which we did not understand at the time, of course, and which is still being deciphered throughout the course of our lives.
Perhaps what we lost was the illusion of our parents’ power to protect us from the terrors of life.
Or perhaps we lost our faith in the possibility that we, the Jews, would ever live a complete, secure life, like all other nations.
And perhaps, above all, we felt the loss of the natural, childlike faith—faith in man, in his kindness, in his compassion.
About two decades ago, when my oldest son was three, his preschool commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day, as it did every year.
My son did not understand much of what he was told, and he came home confused and frightened.
“Dad, what are Nazis?
What did they do?
Why did they do it?” And I did not want to tell him.
I, who had grown up within the silence and fragmented whispers that had filled me with so many fears and nightmares, who had written a book about a boy who almost loses his mind because of his parents’ silence, suddenly understood my parents and my friends’ parents who chose to be mute.
My son did not understand much of what he was told, and he came home confused and frightened.
“Dad, what are Nazis?
What did they do?
Why did they do it?” And I did not want to tell him.
I, who had grown up within the silence and fragmented whispers that had filled me with so many fears and nightmares, who had written a book about a boy who almost loses his mind because of his parents’ silence, suddenly understood my parents and my friends’ parents who chose to be mute.
I felt that if I told him, if I even so much as cautiously alluded to what had happened
over there
, something in the purity of my three-year-old son would be polluted; that from the moment such possibilities of cruelty were formulated in his childlike, innocent consciousness, he would never again be the same child.
over there
, something in the purity of my three-year-old son would be polluted; that from the moment such possibilities of cruelty were formulated in his childlike, innocent consciousness, he would never again be the same child.
He would no longer be a child at all.
When I published
See Under: Love
in Israel, some critics wrote that I belonged to the “second generation” and that I was the son of “Holocaust survivors.” I am not.
My father immigrated to Palestine from Poland as a child, in 1936.
My mother was born in Palestine, before the State of Israel was established.
See Under: Love
in Israel, some critics wrote that I belonged to the “second generation” and that I was the son of “Holocaust survivors.” I am not.
My father immigrated to Palestine from Poland as a child, in 1936.
My mother was born in Palestine, before the State of Israel was established.
And yet I am.
I am the son of “Holocaust survivors” because in my home too, as in so many Israeli homes, a thread of deep anxiety was stretched out, and with almost every move you made, you touched it.
Even if you were very careful, even if you hardly made any unnecessary movements, you still felt that constant quiver of a profound lack of confidence in the possibility of existence.
A suspicion toward man and what might erupt from him at any moment.
I am the son of “Holocaust survivors” because in my home too, as in so many Israeli homes, a thread of deep anxiety was stretched out, and with almost every move you made, you touched it.
Even if you were very careful, even if you hardly made any unnecessary movements, you still felt that constant quiver of a profound lack of confidence in the possibility of existence.
A suspicion toward man and what might erupt from him at any moment.
In our home too, at every celebration, with every purchase of a new piece of furniture, every time a new child was born in the neighborhood, there was a feeling that each such event was one more word, one more sentence, in the intensely conducted dialogue with
over there.
That every presence echoed an absence, and that life, the simplest of daily routines, the most trivial oscillations—“Should the child be allowed to go on the school trip?” or “Is it worth renovating the apartment?”—somehow echoed what happened
over there
: all those things that managed to survive the
there
, and all those that did not; and the life lessons, the acute knowledge that had been burned in our memory.
over there.
That every presence echoed an absence, and that life, the simplest of daily routines, the most trivial oscillations—“Should the child be allowed to go on the school trip?” or “Is it worth renovating the apartment?”—somehow echoed what happened
over there
: all those things that managed to survive the
there
, and all those that did not; and the life lessons, the acute knowledge that had been burned in our memory.
This became all the more pertinent when greater
decisions were at stake: Which profession should we choose?
Should we vote right-wing or left-wing?
Marry or stay single?
Have another child, or is one enough?
Should we even bring a child into this world?
All these decisions and acts, small and large, amounted to a huge, practically superhuman effort to weave the thin fabric of everydayness over the horrors beneath.
An effort to convince ourselves that despite everything we know, despite everything engraved on our bodies and souls, we have the capacity to live on, and to keep choosing life and human existence.
decisions were at stake: Which profession should we choose?
Should we vote right-wing or left-wing?
Marry or stay single?
Have another child, or is one enough?
Should we even bring a child into this world?
All these decisions and acts, small and large, amounted to a huge, practically superhuman effort to weave the thin fabric of everydayness over the horrors beneath.
An effort to convince ourselves that despite everything we know, despite everything engraved on our bodies and souls, we have the capacity to live on, and to keep choosing life and human existence.
Because for people like myself, born in Israel in the years after the Holocaust, the primary feeling—about which we could not talk at all, and for which we may not have had the words at the time—was that for us, for Jews, death was the immediate interlocutor.
That life, even when it was full of the energies and hopes and fruitfulness of a newly revived young country, still involved an enormous and constant effort to escape the dread of death.
That life, even when it was full of the energies and hopes and fruitfulness of a newly revived young country, still involved an enormous and constant effort to escape the dread of death.
You may say, with good reason, that this is in fact the basic human condition.
Certainly it is so, but for us it had daily and pressing reminders, open wounds and fresh scars, and representatives who were living and tangible, their bodies and souls crushed.
Certainly it is so, but for us it had daily and pressing reminders, open wounds and fresh scars, and representatives who were living and tangible, their bodies and souls crushed.
In Israel of the 1950s and ’60s, and not only during times of extreme despair but precisely at those moments when the great commotion of “nation-building” waned, in the moments when we tired a little, just for an instant,
of being a miracle of renewal and re-creation, in those moments of the twilight of the soul, both private and national, we could immediately feel, in the most intimate way, the band of frost that suddenly tightens around our hearts and says quietly but firmly: How quickly life fades.
How fragile it all is.
The body, the family.
Death is true, all else is an illusion.
of being a miracle of renewal and re-creation, in those moments of the twilight of the soul, both private and national, we could immediately feel, in the most intimate way, the band of frost that suddenly tightens around our hearts and says quietly but firmly: How quickly life fades.
How fragile it all is.
The body, the family.
Death is true, all else is an illusion.
Ever since knowing I would be an author, I knew I would write about the Holocaust.
I think these two convictions came to me at the same time.
Perhaps also because from a very young age I had the feeling that all the many books I had read about the Holocaust had left unanswered a few simple but essential questions.
I had to ask these questions of myself, and I had to reply in my own words.
I think these two convictions came to me at the same time.
Perhaps also because from a very young age I had the feeling that all the many books I had read about the Holocaust had left unanswered a few simple but essential questions.
I had to ask these questions of myself, and I had to reply in my own words.
As I grew up, I became increasingly aware that I could not truly understand my life in Israel, as a man, as a father, as a writer, as an Israeli, as a Jew, until I wrote about my unlived life,
over there
, in the Holocaust.
And about what would have happened to me had I been
over there
as a victim, and as one of the murderers.
over there
, in the Holocaust.
And about what would have happened to me had I been
over there
as a victim, and as one of the murderers.
I wanted to know
both
these things.
One was not enough.
both
these things.
One was not enough.
Namely: If I had been a Jew under the Nazi regime, a Jew in a concentration camp or a death camp, what could I have done to save something of myself, of my selfhood, in a reality in which people were stripped not only of their clothes but also of their names, so that they became—to others—numbers tattooed on an arm?
A reality
in which people’s previous lives were taken away from them—their family, their friends, their profession, their loves, their talents.
A reality in which millions of people were relegated, by other human beings, to the lowest rung of existence: to being nothing more than flesh and blood intended for destruction with the utmost efficiency.
A reality
in which people’s previous lives were taken away from them—their family, their friends, their profession, their loves, their talents.
A reality in which millions of people were relegated, by other human beings, to the lowest rung of existence: to being nothing more than flesh and blood intended for destruction with the utmost efficiency.
What was the thing inside me that I could hold up against this attempt at erasure?
What was the thing that could preserve the human spark within me, in a reality entirely aimed at extinguishing it?
What was the thing that could preserve the human spark within me, in a reality entirely aimed at extinguishing it?
One can answer this question only about one’s self, in private.
But perhaps I can suggest a possible path to the answer.
In the Jewish tradition there is a legend, or a belief, that every person has a small bone in his body called the
luz
, located at the tip of the spine, which enfolds the essence of a person’s soul.
This bone cannot be destroyed.
Even if the entire human body is shattered, crushed, or burned, the
luz
bone does not perish.
It stores a person’s spark of uniqueness, the core of his selfhood.
According to the belief, this bone will be the source of man’s resurrection.
But perhaps I can suggest a possible path to the answer.
In the Jewish tradition there is a legend, or a belief, that every person has a small bone in his body called the
luz
, located at the tip of the spine, which enfolds the essence of a person’s soul.
This bone cannot be destroyed.
Even if the entire human body is shattered, crushed, or burned, the
luz
bone does not perish.
It stores a person’s spark of uniqueness, the core of his selfhood.
According to the belief, this bone will be the source of man’s resurrection.
Those of you who would like to find your own response to the question may, when you go home, choose to gather your thoughts and consider: What is the thing within me that is the true root of my soul?
What is the quality, the essence, the final spark that will remain in me even when all other things are extinguished?
What is the thing that has such great and concerted power that I
will be re-created out of it, in an extremely private sort of “big bang”?
What is the quality, the essence, the final spark that will remain in me even when all other things are extinguished?
What is the thing that has such great and concerted power that I
will be re-created out of it, in an extremely private sort of “big bang”?
Once in a while I ask people close to me what they believe their
luz
is, and I have heard many varied answers.
Several writers, and artists in general, have told me that their
luz
is creativity, the passion to create and the urge to produce.
Religious people, believers, have often said that their
luz
is the divine spark they feel inside.
One friend answered, after much thought: Parenthood, fatherhood.
And another friend immediately replied that her
luz
was her longing for the things and people she missed.
A woman who was roughly ninety at the time talked about the love of her life, a man who committed suicide over sixty years ago: he was her
luz
.
luz
is, and I have heard many varied answers.
Several writers, and artists in general, have told me that their
luz
is creativity, the passion to create and the urge to produce.
Religious people, believers, have often said that their
luz
is the divine spark they feel inside.
One friend answered, after much thought: Parenthood, fatherhood.
And another friend immediately replied that her
luz
was her longing for the things and people she missed.
A woman who was roughly ninety at the time talked about the love of her life, a man who committed suicide over sixty years ago: he was her
luz
.
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