Israeli author and journalist David Grossman told Duke community members Wednesday that most Israelis and Palestinians are no longer human beings. “They are victims,” he said, “of their own tragic history.”
Grossman, whose fictional and political books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, told a captivated audience of about 100 how writing fiction in a time of war helped him preserve his humanity and individuality.
Grossman, who lives in Jerusalem, described the insanity of daily life surrounded by conflict. He recalled the comments of one woman when a foreign correspondent asked her why she planned to have three children. She replied, “So that if one of them dies, we will still have two left.”
The insanity even penetrated his own life, he said. After trying to work out a route to school for his children that stayed clear of any recently bombed place, he realized there was no safe way for them to make the journey:
“In the end I just told them: ‘Just walk as fast as you can.’ And and I will never forget the look on their faces.”
When a society exists among conflict, Grossman said, its population becomes obsessed with survival and forgets about living.
“You are preoccupied with with preparing yourself for the next disaster,” he said. “You are so frightened of death that you restrict your life.
“Now you are just surviving so that later you can live. To be a more efficient survivor, a person needs to kill parts of his soul,” he said.
The individual, he said, expects to return to his soul at a time of peace.
“He persuades himself that when peace and serenity arrive, he will be able to redeem the part of his soul that fear took away from him,” Grossman said. But, in fact, this part of him becomes lost and does not return automatically.
The fiction writer, on the other hand, fights the instinct to forget about real life by exploring and understanding the lives and complications of his characters. He compared his position as a writer to a person who shelters a dozen people in a cellar during war. He is responsible for feeding them, checking on them and cleaning up behind them.
“We fight sometimes for years to understand every aspect of a certain human character,” he said. “We live within the bodies of each character.”
As such, Grossman finds himself unable to write fiction about the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His recent novel, composed during the first three years of the Second Intifada, avoids any mention of the political situation. The book delves into a relationship between a man and a woman in a car travelling from Jerusalem to the desert.
“When I wrote this story in the most horrible days of the Intifada, I drove deep into the souls of two people,” he said.
Doing so allowed Grossman to involve himself in the complexities of life that have nothing to do with war and thus to preserve his own individuality. “When we infuse a character with the humanity within us, we demand this individuality,” he said.
The fiction author thus redeems his human side and can begin to reclaim himself. “I have created for myself a kind of freedom of movement. I am no longer a victim,” Grossman said.
The same phenomenon can occur to a certain extent when an author attempts to write about an enemy.
“The enemy is nothing but a collection of frightened, despairing people like us. The enemy sees in us all the things that we always direct towards the enemy,” Grossman said.
He finished saying he knew there were many others, both Israelis and Palestinians, who thought the same way. “Sometimes I felt that we are two groups of miners, digging a tunnel from different sides of the same mountain,” he said.
Freshman Claire Lauterbach said Grossman’s view of the conflict from an artistic perspective was very insightful.
“His comments about seeing the conflict from the enemy’s perspective [are] a good starting point,” she said.
Grossman also penned a No. 1 Israeli hip-hop song. When asked about it, Grossman described how he collected political slogans from bumper stickers over nine years and arranged them in rhyming patterns. Set to music by the Israeli band Hadag Nahash, “The Poetry of the Sticker” was a best-seller in Israel.
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