To the End of the Land by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen (Knopf)
David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land appeared in Hebrew in 2008 under the much more accurate title A Woman Escaping News. The woman is Ora, who is the centre of Grossman’s imaginative history of Israel between 1967 and 2001. The news Ora tries to escape is the news of the five decades of violence and disorder produced by Israel’s seizure of territory and population at the beginning of that period.
To the End of the Land, like most successful novels, is organised around a simple contrast, in this case between the almost paradise of private and family life, and the purgatory of the collective world of occupation, military conflict and hierarchy. If Ora wants to escape from politics and protect her family from its stern requirements, then Grossman has been more and less fortunate. His career, from the 1987 study of the occupation in The Yellow Wind, has been at cross-purposes with Israeli policy. To this day Grossman attends the protests at Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, to highlight the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the city. In what seems like an intolerable irony, in the course of writing a novel about a woman who flees the news that may concern her son being killed while on military service, Grossman’s own son, Uri, was killed in a tank in Lebanon by a Hezbollah rocket during the 2006 Israeli incursion.
To the End of the Land is made up of set pieces that principally concern Ora, her first lover, Avram, Avram’s friend, Ilan, who will become her husband and then abandon her, and her sons, Ofer and Adam.
Some of these sections are more successful, in particular Grossman’s astonishing depiction of Ilan and Ofer’s experiences in the 1973 war when they are cut off in the Sinai by the Egyptian army. Some extended parts of the novel are much slower and undramatic, such as Ora’s lengthy recollections of the young household she establishes with Ilan. The beginning of the narrative, when the three principal characters meet during the blackouts of the 1967 war, is confusing. Even the frame of this long novel, which is established by the conversations between Ora and Avram on a hike through the Galilee, seems more than contrived.
I was often impatient with the narrative. Yet there were as many times I was sure that I was reading a work of very great imagination and feeling, at least and maybe more than the equal of, say, Yehuda Amichai’s poetry and Amos Oz’s memoir, Time of Love and Darkness. The concentration on Ora is not always thrilling but you come to be familiar with the shifts and turns of her character and to believe in the truth of her existence so that, when Avram foresees his replacement by Ilan and writes to his ‘duplicitous Ora” that ‘deep in the depths of your light-filled and beautiful soul — lies a minuscule recess — that is, forgive me, slightly narrow-minded in matters of love”, you can say to yourself that Avram is right, of course, and yet that Ora, in her narrow-mindedness and ordinariness, is not the less remarkable.
Ora’s children are brought to life with a quicker hand: ‘If Adam happened to touch any part of his body, he quickly blew on it. The new rule, which he apparently had to obey categorically, was rapidly turning him into a tight knot of gestures and counter-gestures, which he tried very hard to hide, but Ora saw. And Ilan saw.” Ora’s perspectives on her own experience develop. She ‘is struck by the fact that she is capable of looking at Adam this way. Ilan’s objective views of the boys is now hers, too. She is learning to speak a foreign language. Note by note, she depicts a young man of twenty-four who looks both weak and tough at the same time.”
And now and again there are lines in the narrative that reminded me of Isaac Babel’s dictum that ‘no iron spike can pierce the human heart as icily as a period in the right place”. When, for instance, ‘Ora suddenly knows what Avram and Neta share: they have both found that those who stroke can also hit”. I could multiply examples but the point is that To the End of the Land is not the product of a person who thinks about writing but of someone who thinks about life and sees it not as a story to the outside world but for what it is to the soul, an almost endless sequence of shifts of feeling and perception.
To the End of the Land is a strong enough novel that one wants to ask a final question: Is it true to history? Grossman, like Amos Oz and other Israeli liberals, develops the situation in Israel and Palestine as a tragedy, one in which two peoples have a claim to the same land. It was Oz, I think, who defined one of a writer’s tasks as listening to vibrations in language.
I wonder if Grossman and Oz, like Ora, can afford to hear what their society says. The language of Israel’s political and religious leadership is, to say the least, vivid. The man who is now Israel’s foreign minister and chief diplomat, Avigdor Lieberman, suggested drowning Palestinian prisoners ‘in the Dead Sea, since that’s the lowest point in the world”. Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi of the state of Israel, called for God ‘to strike Palestinians down with the plague” and announced, just last month, that ‘the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews — Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [a lord] and eat.”
It’s difficult to hear those words, which have a clear and dynamic intention, without remembering South Africa’s own history, which may be why there are so many recent threads connecting this country to that region, from Richard Goldstone’s report and subsequent harassment to Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s study of Israeli-South African military cooperation and Archbishop Tutu’s objections to Cape Town Opera’s plans to tour Israel — which prompted Rhoda Kadalie, a columnist for Business Day, in one of her very stupidest and most malicious moments, to call the archbishop a bigot.
Books are supposed to tutor humanity, and Israel, deep in its simultaneous dreams of dominion and victimisation, is not without such books. But dreamers are more certain than writers because they don’t come into contact with the reality of human beings. It is difficult to believe that such complex and hesitating voices as Ora’s, and Grossman’s own, have any real chance to prevail over those iron dreams.