David Grossman at Levontin 7
This past Friday afternoon David Grossman, one of Israel's best-known authors, read some of his poems about love to a small audience at Levontin 7, a performance space in Tel Aviv. Since his son, Uri, was killed in Lebanon during the last days of the war last summer, he has appeared in public very rarely. So there were quite a few journalists present, including a television crew, but still it felt like an intimate occasion - perhaps because the space was so small, or perhaps because so many people there seemed to know one another. Some of the poems were sung to music, while others were read - like one about love discovered in middle age, which Grossman read together with an actress ("Perhaps it’s a pity that we did not met 20 years ago/An entire lifetime passed over me as if I were waiting / You did not know me when my hair was in braids/Or when I was pregnant").
Just before the end, Grossman touched indirectly on his own loss. He noted that we were two-and-a-half days before Memorial Day, and that "due to the circumstances," he felt a need to end the evening with a short reading from one of his novels, See Under: Love . The excerpt he read from is about a man named Wasserman, who is an elderly Jewish writer in a Nazi death camp, telling a story to one of the German guards. He tells the guard about a child war orphan, named Kazik, whom he and some other elderly Jews adopted. At one point they all take turns expressing hopes and prayers for the little boy's future, even as the ghetto is burning, the few survivors are being deported to death camps, and the whole world is going up in flames. And one of the old people says, "You know what I wish for him? I wish that he will end his days without knowing anything about war."
In Metulla last summer, during the war, while sitting in a hotel filled with journalists as rockets boomed outside, a friend of mine who is a photojournalist told me that he and his wife were wondering if they had made a mistake in having a child. "The wars will never end," he said. "And I don't want my child to grow up and go to the army, maybe die in some stupid wasteful conflict." I looked at him and didn't know what to say.
A month later we met at an outdoor cafe on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, and I asked him how he was feeling. He shrugged and said that life went on, then smiled and told me about something adorable his child had done that morning while he and his wife were still lying in bed.
I always feel ambivalent on state-mandated sad days - like a lot of people, I guess. I don't like having my emotions tugged at, and I don't like uncritical emotions. And on Memorial Day in Israel, the grief is inescapable. The sun is setting now, and I can already hear the sad music on the radio. The shops and cafes are closed, the streets are quiet, and all the newspapers are filled with stories about bereaved families and dead soldiers. On the other hand, sometimes it is important to take a day to meditate and remember.
This year in Tel Aviv there are a few memorial events that are meant to add some nuance to the grieving. Beit Daniel, the Centre for Progressive Judaism in Tel Aviv, held a meeting for bereaved Palestinian and Israeli parents last Thursday. Tonight, after the official ceremony at Rabin Square that begins with a one-minute siren at 8 p.m., followed by the standard speeches and sad songs, there will be a performance event at Tzavta Theatre that will focus on the losses of the Lebanon War. It's called The Fallen One (חלל) and participants include David Broza , Rockfour, poet Rony Somek (born in Baghdad in 1951) and singer Shlomo Mizrachi, who will perform the national anthem in Jimi Hendrix style. According to the organizer, the point is not to be iconoclastic but "...to remind people that behind the wars and the death are human beings, and the generals need to remember...that they are responsible for lives." (Time Out Tel Aviv). The same Time Out article mentions an event called "Bereavement of Peace," that will also include bereaved Palestinian and Israeli parents, with a focus on universal loss - not just Israeli loss - in violent conflicts.
This photo, from today's Maariv newspaper, shows a young man named Yonatan who died while rescuing wounded soldiers in Lebanon during the war last summer. Three days before he was killed, he wrote "I am going to die" on a piece of paper and had one of his friends snap his photo. According to the article, the sign was supposed to be dark humour. Instead, it turned out to be a prophecy.
