I BOOKS I
ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
Assistant Editor
A
: Author. Israeli writ-
er David Grossman be-
came the talk of the
town with his book The
Yellow Wind. Published in
1988, The Yellow Wind tells of
Grossman's three-month stay
in the West Bank, and of the
Palestinians' terrible hatred
of Israel.
B: Books. In 1989,
Grossman published See
Under: Love, a novel that
has critics scrambling in
search of new adjectives of
praise.
The book is written in four
parts. The first is the story of
Momik, the nine-year-old
child of Holocaust survivors,
and his search for a creature
called "the Nazi Beast."
Part two, "Bruno," is a
re-creation of the life of
Polish Jewish author Bruno
Schulz. Part three returns to
Momik, now writing a novel
about how his grandfather
survived the Holocaust by
telling stories to an SS
guard. And part four, "The
Full Encyclopedia of the Life
of Kazik," is the story of one
Nazi prisoner's life, written
in encyclopedia form; among
the headings is "Sex," with
the first entry, "See under:
LOVE."
C: Come closer. Grossman
is quiet, private, and in love
with words. In Detroit this
David Grossman: "I wanted to write a book so vivid it would shiver on the shelf."
week, he discussed The
Yellow Wind, See Under:
Love and his other short
stories, plays and books.
But wait. Start the en-
cyclopedia again. And this
time don't begin Grossman's
life with his books but with
his childhood in Jerusalem,
where he was born 35 years
ago.
A
: Average — which is
the way Grossman de-
scribes his childhood.
His mother was born in
Israel, his father came to the
Jewish state from Poland
when he was 8.
"I had the usual, banal
childhood," Grossman said.
But when he was 8,
Grossman entered the
magical world of Sholom
Aleichem. His father
brought home books by the
Yiddish author, whose
stories of shtetl life, "were
like an ambassador between
me and the childhood of my
father."
At the same time,
Grossman was overwhelm-
ed.
"I couldn't comprehend
that such a reality really ex-
isted," he said of Aleichem's
THE COMPLETE
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
GROSSMAN'S LIFE
The author of The Yellow Winds and
See Under: Love, David Grossman is
a man in love with the written word.
tales. Nor could he imagine
that life had been destroyed
by the Nazis.
He'd heard about the 6
Million, "but a child can't
understand it. It's too huge a
number to be understood."
Then when Grossman was
9, "It suddenly struck me
that the people killed there
are my people."
As his fellow students
delighted in tales of the
great, new state of Israel,
Grossman continued to be
absorbed by the Old World,
by the kinds of men and wo-
men he read about in
Aleichem's novels and by
their deaths at the Nazis'
hands.
"For me, it was a kind of
secret," Grossman says. "I
felt that I'm the guardian of
that treasure."
By the time he was 10,
Grossman had won an Israel
Radio contest on the works
of Sholom Aleichem. Soon
the station hired him as a
correspondent, and he trav-
eled around the country do-
ing interviews. It was then
Grossman began earning
more money than his father,
and then when he started to
"decipher the codes of
adults."
Despite his devotion to
Sholom Aleichem, Grossman
had no interest in becoming
an author.
"I didn't know I wanted to
be a writer until the first
moment I started to write,"
he said.
The writing began when
Grossman was 25.
"I got stuck in a situation
and nobody could help. So I
sat down and started
writing, though I didn't
know what I would write
about."
What he wrote was
"Mules," a short story
published in his collection
The Jogger. The story con-
cerns an American soldier
who runs from Vietnam to
Austria, where his only
friends are mules.
"Mules" tells of a man
"trapped in an inescapable
situation," Grossman said.
"Now I know why I wrote it.
Before it was just the urge
and the physical pleasure
that something could be cre-
ated out of words.
"I felt so much it was the
right thing to do; it was in
my bones."
After The Jogger,
Grossman wrote The Smile
of the Lamb, the story of an
Arab peasant and an Israeli
soldier. Following publica-
tion of The Smile of the
Lamb, the Israeli weekly
Koteret Rashit asked
Grossman to spend seven
weeks in 1987 in the West
Bank, in anticipation of the
20th anniversary of the Six-
Day War.
Beginning with the men
and women Grossman inter-
views in The Yellow Wind's
opening chapter, set at the
Deheisha refugee camp, Pa-
lestinians are shown as tor-
tured, suffering, angry and
having little interest in
making peace with Israel.
In one scene, Grossman re-
counts how a 2-year-old
pretends to shoot him, to the
satisfaction of his teachers
standing nearby.
Smiling, the teachers say:
"Who do you want to shoot?"
The child responds:
"Jews."
The Yellow Wind was
released to mass praise and
criticism. Right-wingers
hated it and insisted
Grossman was overly sym-
pathetic to the Palestinians.
Grossman disagrees.
"I'm not biased," he said.
"But I heard so many hostile
expressions about Israel and
saw so many revelations of
hatred."
Though he has been
known to make statements
most would identify as lib-
eral (He once said in an
interview, "The fact is that
I'm standing before Israeli
audiences and I'm saying:
Yes, we must talk with the
PLO."), Grossman did not
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