To the End of the Land

"It’s about Ora. She’s a middle-aged mother of two, and her son is about to be released from the Israeli military army, which is obligatory here. Then he’s called, once again, to a military operation, and she drags him back to the base and leaves him there. When she comes back home knowing that he’s about to go out on this operation, she feels that she can’t do this job, this role of a woman, which is to stay back home and wait to hear about your beloved ones who go to war. She has this magical thinking that if she stays at home, then somebody will come and knock on her door and tell her that her son has been killed. So, in order to escape this message, she just leaves the house—not telling anybody—and starts walking across Israel. “This is not just literature, this is reality” For me, this is the greatest Israeli novel, at least of this decade. I think what David Grossman does with the political situation and the family situation is brilliant: he shows the war of the husband and the wife, and the war of trying to raise a child, alongside the outside war — the war between Israel and its neighbours, and he brings it all together in one amazing novel. I’m sad to say that I do. When I was a kid, I remember asking my parents about the army, and they told that by the time I’d be a grown-up, there wouldn’t be any army and there wouldn’t be any wars. I don’t feel I can say that to my child today. I think that would be lying. Definitely. In Israel, everybody knows somebody who’s been killed in the army. I mean everybody. It is either a friend from school, or a relative, or it’s a friend of a friend, but there’s always somebody you know, and that really sets the mentality. I think what Grossman is trying to do in To the End of the Land is the almost neurological operation of trying to understand how it all links together. His protagonist is trying to understand this whole mess of Israeli society. She says, ‘How could it be that I’m the mother taking my own child and driving him back to the army? This is crazy! This is like Abraham taking Isaac to be slaughtered in Genesis. I can’t believe that I’m the one driving him there. I should be the one locking him inside a house, refusing to let him go.’ I think this is a brilliant combination of the domestic life—what it means to be a mother, and the Biblical aspect—because he uses the story of Abraham and Isaac, and also the political — what it means to have generation after generation going into war. If, while you are writing a novel about the biggest fear a parent can have, that fear comes true, then writing changes from a poetic act into a magical act. It can be really really frightening — for the readers, not just for the writer. You realise that this is not just literature, this is reality."