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David Grossman (b. 1954) |
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Israeli novelist, journalist, and children's storywriter, who has examined in his works Jewish-Palestinian relations in the Occupied Territories. In 1991, David Grossman was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary oeuvre. Grossman has also received the Israel Prize for A Life Project 2004 for his special contribution to society and to the State of Israel. "Even Israel's conduct and its crimes in the occupied territories for fifty-six years cannot justify of soften what has been laid bare: the depth of hatred towards Israel, the painful understanding that we Israelis will always have to live here in heightened alertness and constant preparedness for war. In an unceasing efforts to be both Athens and Sparta at once. And fundamental doubt that we might ever be able to lead a normal, free life, unfettered by threats and anxieties. A stable, secure life. A life that is home." ('Prologue: Who will we be when we rise from the ashes?' 10 0ctober 2023, in The Thinking Heart: Essays on Israel and Palestine by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen, New York: Vintage International, 2025, p. 12) David Grossman was born in Jerusalem, the son of Yizchak Grossman, originally from Austria, and Michaela, a Jerusalemite. Grossman's father had emigrated to Palestine in 1936. He did not reveal much of his childhood but once gave his son Sholem Aleichem's book Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor's Son, saying: "Read, read, it's just how things were with us." (Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen, 2008, pp. 4-6) At home Grossman learned to love Yiddish literature, but before becoming a writer, Grossman worked on the radio. Already at the age of nine, he was a youth reporter, who conducted interviews and performed in radio plays. After his military service, Grossman continued his radio work and entered Hebrew University, where he studied philosophy and theatre, graduating in 1979. Before publishing his first collection of stories, Ratz (1983), Grossman received the Neuman Prize for his story 'Yani on the Mountain'. 'Donkeys' was awarded in 1980 the Harry Hirshon Prize. Grossman's established his fame as a leading Israeli novelist
in the 1980s. His first novel, Hiyukh ha-gedi
(1983, The Smile of the Lamb), and the first Israeli novel to be set on
the West Bank, examined life under
Israeli occupation. The critically appraised book was made into
film, which received an award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1990. "The Palestinians, as is well known, are making use of the ancient Jewish strategy of exile and have removed themselves from history. They close their eyes against harsh reality. and stubbornly clamping down their eyelids, they fabricate their Promised Land. "Next year in Jerusalem," said the Jews in Latvia and in Cracow and in San'a, and the meaning was that they were not willing to compromise. Because they had no hope for any real change. He who has nothing to lose can demand everything and until his Jerusalem becomes real, he will do nothing to bring it closer. And here also, again and again, the absolute demand everything. Nablus and Hebron and Jaffa and Jerusalem. And in the meantime—nothing." (in The Yellow Wind by David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman, London: Vintage, 2016, p. 5; first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1988) The Yellow Wind (1987) was an account of Grossman's observations on the West Bank, where he noted that refugees have "turned themselves voluntarily into doubles of the real people who once were, in another place. Into people who hold in their hands only one real asset: the ability to wait." (Ibid., p. 7) The book originated from an article Grossman had published in the newsweekly Koteret Rashit. A fluent speaker of Arabic, he had been sent to visit Palestinian refugee camps and cities by the magazine. Upon its publication, the prophetic article generated an uproar in Israel. As it turned out, Grossman's warnings presaged the intifada of the early 1990s. The Yellow Wind was adapted into a play and staged in Tel Aviv. Politically liberal, Grossman resigned his radio post to protest restrictions on journalistic work, especially in Palestinian issues. On November 15, 1988, when Yasser Arafat declared an independent Palestinian state, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority did not cover the event. "I refuse to collaborate in laundering the reality as it is imposed on me," Grossman wrote in 1988 in his letter of resignation. ('Grossman, David,' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited Vineta Colby, 1995, p. 321) In the same year, Grossman received the Har Zion Prize in recognition of his efforts to enhance peace and understanding between Arabs and Jews. Grossman has acknowledged Kafka and Böll as his literary beacons. 'Ayen erekh: 'ahavah' (1986, See Under: Love), Grossman's second novel, was compared in the New York Times Book Review with such celebrated works as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The central characters in the interlinked stories, narrated by four voices, are Momik Neumann, the only child of Holocaust survivors, Bruno Schulz, a real-life writer, who was murdered by the Nazis, Anshel Wasserman, Momik's granduncle, and Kazik, the hero of one of Wasserman's stories. Momik in the first section associates Nazism with a beast the cellar, and he decides to capture and tame it. Like the protagonist in The Tin Drum, Aaron in The Book of Intimate Grammar (1991) stops growing physically. The novel ends with Aaron's possible suicide, on the eve of the Six Day War in 1967. From his early works, Grossman has used modernist narrative techniques, stream-of-consciousness writing, multifaceted views, and experimented with fantasy, especially through the worlds of children. Grossman has also written a series for children about a boy named Itamar. Itamar metapes al kirot (1986), a play, has participated in international festivals in Belgium, Holland, Poland, Germany, and Austria. It was also invited to participate in an international festival for children's theater in Montreal in September 2004. After publishing works dealing with Arab/Jewish relations or Holocaust themes, Grossman focused in Someone To Run With (2000) on the life of Jerusalem's drug addicts and runaways. The love story of Tamar, a runaway, and Assaf, an errand boy, combined fairy-tale elements with realistic portrayal of street kids. "Ultimately, this is a literary political novel, or a politico-literary novel," wrote Claire Messud in The New York Times, "that engages us with the means and effects of its storytelling more intently than with its depiction of any actual world." (February 8, 2004) The book was awarded the Sappir Prize for Literature in 2001. Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo (2003) collected Grossman's essays and articles from al-Ayyam, The Guardian, Newsweek and other magazines and newspapers from 1993. "The agreement made with the Palestinians will bring them back to history," Grossman wrote optimistically after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat had signed in 1993 the Oslo Accords. "If a people receive a place of their own, they can also return to time, to the natural progress of history. With such a people, one can begin to conduct negotiations between equals and to establish tolerable neighborly relations." (Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo, translated by Haim Watzman, edited by Efrat Lev, New York: Picador, 2004, p. 4) Grossman is considered one of Israel's most perceptive writers, who has with his work and constant activity brought closer together secular and religious people. In May 2005 Grossman and Amos Elon were named winners of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize 2004. Grossman's Someone to Run With won the Fiction Award, Amos Elon took the Non-Fiction Prize. In August 2006 Grossman joined A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz in a plea to Israeli Prime Minister to reach a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. A few days later Grossman's younger son, Uri, a tank commander in the Israeli Defense Forces, died in southern Lebanon, after his tank was hit by a Hezbollah missile. Grossman was awarded in 2010 the German Book Trade Peace Prize. Grossman began writing To the End of the Land in 2003.
The story about two friends, Avram and Ilan, who love the same girl,
takes place between 1967 and 2000. Ora marries Ilan, has a child with
him, but later also with Avram. War and other forces beyond one's
control destroy Avram's life, but Ora raises his son as Ilan's own.
Falling Out of Time
(2011) is a drama in verse and prose. This work, not set in
Israel, tells about coping with the loss of a child and the search
for solace and meaning. Also A Horse
Walks Into a Bar
(2014) took readers by surprise – the central character is an
appalling comedian. The book was banned from most religious
schools. In 2017, it won the Man Booker International prize for the
year's best fiction in translation. Grossman shared the prize with his
translator Jessica Cohen. The work has been optioned for a feature film
production by Village Roadshow Pictures. Following President Bashar Assad's brutal crackdown on
the
country's uprising, Grossman and other writers, such as Umberto
Eco, Amos Oz, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, and Wole Soyinka, urged in
June 2011 the United Nations to condemn the repression in Syria as a
crime against humanity. In an article entitled 'On hope and despair in
the Middle East,' Grossman wrote that "It's maddening to think that the
tremendous military power Israel has amassed is not giving it the
courage to overcome its fears and existential despair and take a
decisive step that will bring peace." (Quantara.de, 8th July 2014) In
December 2014, Grossman, Amoz Oz and other prominent Israelis signed a
petion for the recognition of a Palestinian state. When US President
Donald Trump visited Israel in 2017, Grossman's children's book The Hug
(2013) was given to First Lady Melania Trump. It was dedicated to her
son Barron. Iti ha-ḥayim meśaḥeḳ
harbeh (2019,
More Than I Love My Life)
is a psychological puzzle about a secret, and its damaging effect on
several generations of a family. Grossman novel was inspired by a true
story about a woman who was imprisoned in Tito's Yugoslavia on the
notorious prison island Goli Otok. There Vera, the grandmother and hero
of the family, had to make an impossible choice, which forms the core
of the story. For further reading: The Arab in Israeli Literature by Gila Ramras-Rauch (1989); Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction by Naomi Sokoooff (1992); 'Grossman, David,' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby (1995); 'David Grossman, The Art of Fiction,' interviewed by Jonathan Shainin, The Paris Review, Issue 182 (Fall 2007); 'Foreigners Cannot Understand the Israelis' Vulnerability,' interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Christoph Schult, Der Spiegel (10.08.2009); The Outsider Inside: Ideas of Jewishness in Contemporary Jewish, Postcolonial, and Palestinian Literature by Isabelle Hesse (2013); Guf pogesh śafah: ḳeriʼah psikhoʼanaliṭit be-sipuraṿ shel Daṿid Grosman = Body and Language Encounter: A Psychoanalytic Reading in David Grossman's Stories by Amir Ḳlugman (2022) - Special thanks to Orly Orava for her help with this page Selected works:
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