“The first story I wrote?” asks the soft-spoken Israeli author David Grossman, a smile playing on his face. For a fleeting moment a faraway look clouds his eyes before they light up once again, the delight and excitement he enjoys while narrating tales clearly visible in them.
“It was when I was 19 and had a girlfriend. Ahh, she was the woman I adored very deeply,” says the now 68-year-old, in a video interview from his home in Jerusalem.
Delighted and delirious in the enchanting world of love, the teenage couple were living together happily in a small room without a care in the world. “But one day we had a slight disagreement about something,” he says, “and she packed all her belongings into her backpack and left me to go back and live with her parents.”
To say young David was grief-stricken would be an understatement. He was shattered, crushed, heart-broken. “Devastated,” he says, his eyes lowered. “I thought if she doesn’t love me, no one in the world would ever love me. She meant everything to me.”
For a while after she left, David did not quite knowing what to do. Then, out of “a survival urge”, he went to the small kitchen desk – the only one they had in their little home – and started writing a story. “I had no clue [of the plot] but words started pouring out of me as I started writing,” he recalls.
The story was of an American soldier in Vietnam who, not wanting to continue fighting, deserts the army and flees to Austria. All alone, with no one to care for, he feels isolated, convinced no one wants him or loves him. The only feeling of love and warmth he gets is once a week when he visits a small drove of donkeys a little away from where he stays. He brings them pieces of bread to eat and they in return snuggle up next to him giving him warmth and instilling in him a feeling of being loved and wanted. “By the way, I love donkeys,” says David, with a smile. “All my stories have a donkey.”
The surprise
After writing the story in long hand – computers weren’t yet popular – the young author put it into an envelope but instead of mailing it to a publication house, posted it to his beloved who had left him.
Four days later, he was in for a pleasant surprise when he heard a knock on his door. “It was my love. She had come back to me.
“We are together for 46 years now,” says the father of two (they had three kids, but one son died in a war. About that tragedy, later).
The joy of reuniting with his beloved is still palpable in his voice and visible in the twinkle in his bespectacled eyes. “You know what? I guess there are some good side-effects to literature,” he says, chuckling wholeheartedly.
That story – titled Donkeys – might have been David’s first written one, but the fact that the award-winning author is a talented storyteller was evident from the time he was in kindergarten.
When barely five years old, he remembers being chosen by the class nurse to tell a story to a bunch of kids so she could take a break. “Looking back, I think there was something suspicious about her,” says the jolly, avuncular man, a hint of child-like mischief flickering in his eyes. “She gathered the children, set them in front of me and said, ‘David will tell you a story’ and disappeared. I don’t know where she went.”
Little David began telling a story inventing plots and twists as he went on; the children silent and all ears.
“I suppose it was that day I realised how deeply one can touch the hearts of people through story telling; hearts and minds, because story-telling is really a combination of the mind and the heart.”
Over the years, David would write more than 23 books that were translated into more than 40 languages. Along the way he would pick up more than 20 awards and honours including the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Rome’s Premio per la pace e l’azione umanitaria, the Frankfurt peace prize, Germany’s Buxtehuder Bulle and Israel’s Emet prize.
Praised by The Guardian as “one of the world’s great novelists”, four of his works, including The Smile of the Lamb and The Book of Intimate Grammar, were the basis of award-winning films.
The winner of the Israel Prize of Literature, credits his father for instilling in him a love for the written word and has fond memories of his growing up years. “My dad was a bus driver in Jerusalem and I was the kid sitting next to him boasting to other kids that my father is the driver,” he reminisces.
After his father quit his job as a driver, he set up a library for children becoming the librarian. The result: David had first pickings of all new books that arrived in the library. “I would devour the books,” he says.
A new world
A life-changing moment in his journey in the world of literature occurred when his father gave him a book by Sholem Aleichem, often referred to as the Jewish Mark Twain because of the authors’ similar writing styles.
Sholem wrote about the world of Jews as a diaspora who experienced misery and fear of being uprooted at every second. As he started reading it, he recalls being “swept away because Sholem revealed a huge new world that I did not know existed”.
David remembers reading it “like a kid who had read Harry Potter for the first time. Suddenly I realised there was a whole new reality with its own course, institutes and language. And the melody of the language was different. I spoke Hebrew they spoke Yiddish.”
The young boy finished the book in a week and went back to his father for more.
Although Sholem’s books were not exactly aimed at kids, they were like the “ambassadors of the childhood of my father who grew up in Poland”, says David, adding he became increasingly affected and belonging to the characters in Sholem’s works. “He became relevant to me.”
There were several other authors too he enjoyed – Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf… He enrolled himself into three libraries apart from the one his father managed. “I received so much pleasure reading. The only thing that can match reading is the pleasure of writing,” he says, with a smile.
And writing he took up even while studying theatre and philosophy, and during his long stint working as a radio journalist. Books began emerging at regular intervals – fiction, non-fiction and books for children.
Is it difficult to move from one genre to another? I ask.
“It’s not difficult. The only thing that changes is the melody. There is a different melody for documentaries, for fiction and of course for children’s literature,” says the writer who has also written opera for children and constantly keeps pushing the boundaries of the written word.
Children’s literature, he believes, offers both the parent who is reading the story to their kid and the child who is listening to the story, an opportunity to bond, to disarm themselves from the demands and tensions of everyday life. “You know the 15 minutes when you are curl up next to your child and read them a story could be the most beautiful moments you can cherish,” he says.
Bedtime tales
He himself remembers – and cherishes – the times his father used to read him bedtime tales. “There were always some words that I did not understand and my father would want to stop and explain those words to me, and I would say ‘no, don’t do that’. I liked their exotic dimension; they would remain in the room long after my father had left me after kissing me goodnight. They flickered in the darkness… these words that I did not understand, and slowly over the years I started to understand them.”
For David, a good-night story is one that whisks away the kid and the parent who is reading the story to an unknown world where they would be like tourists – exploring, enjoying and getting excited by all the enthralling events and sights there. When his parents used to read to him, he recalls being able to catch a glimpse of them as children “bereft of all their harshness of their duties of the day” laughing and enjoying the tale as much as he did listening to it.
Adding a hint of humour to stories is not unusual for David and that is particularly visible in his Man Booker International Prize winner book A Horse walks into the Bar. Much more than just the story of a stand-up comic, the novel delves deep into life, the pains of living and of survival, with plenty of one-liners sprinkled all through.
Can you share a joke from the book, I ask.
Okay, he says, gleefully. “A horse walks into a bar and asks the barman for a drink. The barman is of course astonished to see a talking horse, but he gives it what it asked for. The horse then asks the barman how much the drink costs and he says ‘50 bucks’. The horse is now surprised at the price, however, it places the money on the table and prepares to leave. As it reaches the door, the barman calls and asks it to stop. ‘Excuse me Mr Horse,’ he says. ‘I must say I never saw a talking horse before’.”
And the horse says, “Yes, with your prices you will never see one again.”
David rocks on his chair and chortles wholeheartedly.
For the author, humour is viewing reality from an altered point of view; seeing the funny in something formal, official and stiff. “Humour is the ability to discover another way of looking at things. Suddenly you are not obliged to the rigidity that reality tried to impose on you. You are a rebel, going against the stream.” David makes it clear that humour is something that is “so important. It is what helped me survive and go through the harshest experience in my life. In the worst times of life, the ability to generate humour to see reality from a different point of view... that is what really saved me.”
A pall of grief shrouds his face as he remembers the loss of his 20-year-old son Uri. The young man was fighting in the Israeli army in 2006 in southern Lebanon when his military tank was destroyed barely hours before a ceasefire ordered by the UN came into force.
“It’s hard for me to talk about it,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I can just say that it taught me something about writing that I was unable to learn in another way.”
Some three years before the terrible tragedy occurred, David had started working on a novel that told the story of a mother who has a strong feeling that her son, who is serving in the army, would die. Believing that it takes two to deliver the bad news – one to deliver and one to receive – she decides not to be at home when the army comes with the tragic news. He titled the book, The woman escaping the news.
“Then Uri fell, and I thought I would never be able to save [or complete] the book,” he says.
For seven days he lamented the death of his son. Then on the eighth day, he returned to his study and began writing once again. “I had an obligation to my characters; I was unable to leave them,” says David.
The first day he wrote for an hour, the next day for an hour and half… Gradually he revitalised the story, infused his characters with warmth and humour, gave them a world view, included love, passion, sensuality… “All these things that I thought had died, the characters brought out of me,” he says.
‘The book saved me’
Two years later, he finished the book (The English translation is titled To the End of the Land). “At one point I had wondered whether I’d be able to save the book; but in reality it was the book that saved me.”
It surely did. Although the pain of the loss is still deep, David has penned several more books. His most recent, More than I love my life, a multigenrational saga whose central character is a Yogoslav woman.
As we come to the end of the interview, he reminds me once again “how the power of language can change reality”.
“There are very few experiences in life that can give you what writing a good story can,” he says.
What has been the proudest moment in your writing career? I ask.
“There have been a few,” he says with a smile, before narrating an incident a friend’s daughter told him about the time she visited a village in Slovakia. “One day she was relaxing in the verandah of the home she was holidaying in there when she heard a local woman call out to her pet golden retriever ‘Dinka, Dinka, come home .
“Dinka is a major character in one of my books, so when the friend’s daughter heard the name she was intrigued and went up to the village woman and told her, ‘Do you know the name Dinka is so so unusual here. How come you named your dog Dinka?’ and the woman said ‘I read it in a book by an author named David Grosmann’.
“I’ve received several prizes and awards, but the fact that there is a dog called after the name of a character in my book in Slovakia, that makes me truly proud!”
