Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's Reading List

"This is the first novel I read in Hebrew that talks about the settlements in the Occupied Territories from within. I’ve never read anything like it. The settlement debate in Israel today is such that either you take it as morally wrong and a catastrophe, or you think it is completely just. Then, suddenly, somebody comes and writes a novel that is so funny and so cynical and so ironic, and it doesn’t fall into either one of those categories. “Jews feel that the best way to bear the burden of life is to deal with it with a sense of humour” It’s about an imaginary small settlement in the Occupied Territories, situated right in front of a small Arab village. Gavron writes about the people who live there, who for many left-wing readers are the ultimate ‘other’. A left-wing writer would typically say these people are morally wrong, and I can totally understand the political perspective, but when you write literature, you can’t judge your characters all the time, it just doesn’t work. Instead, Gavron writes about them as human beings — for instance, they wake up in the middle of the night when the baby’s crying and don’t want to get up, so they pretend they didn’t hear it. I think left-wing people would feel uncomfortable reading The Hilltop because there is too much humanisation of the other side, and I think right-wing people would hate it because it makes fun of the settlements — it is very ironic. When everybody hates you from all sides like that, you are probably doing something well. I think so. I think that Jews feel that the best way to bear the burden of life is to deal with it with a sense of humour. There is something funny even in the saddest of these novels — there is always this irony. Sometimes it’s so sharp that you don’t exactly laugh, you’re half laughing, half crying."

"Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian citizen of Israel: a Palestinian in origin, living in Israel. Most Jewish people would call Palestinian citizens of Israel ‘Israeli-Arabs’ because many Jews don’t acknowledge the idea of Palestinian identity, but they would call themselves Palestinian citizens of Israel because they’re saying, ‘We’re not just Arabs, we’re Palestinians living in Israel and we do consider ourselves Palestinians, and you won’t be the ones who decide which identity we have.’ This is exactly what this novel is about. It is about the struggle to have an identity. “He knows that he will never be part of Israeli society unless he is Jewish” Kashua wrote this brilliant novel about this situation. His protagonist is a Palestinian social worker who lives in Jerusalem and works in Jerusalem, and wants to feel part of Israeli society, while knowing that he will never be part of Israeli society unless he is Jewish. I think it asks a lot questions about of what sides of your own identity you have to be willing to cut in order to be accepted. I think it is because he dares to tell the truth, and people are fascinated by it, but there is only so much truth one can take before it’s too much. For a long time, he was very much loved, and then in the middle of the Gaza war, he wrote a very painful article about how he felt that everybody on the Israeli side was too busy with what was happening to the Israeli soldiers. He said, ‘OK, but what’s happening to the people in Gaza?’ People couldn’t stand it, because, for them, writing about the Palestinian suffering is like saying that you don’t care about the Israeli suffering, which, of course, is not what he meant at all, but when you think it is a zero sum game, then I think today it’s very difficult for some of the Israeli public to accept what he is writing. But I think he’s the most important Israeli writer today."

"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."

"Homesick starts with a couple who’ve decided to move in together. They are both students: one is studying in Jerusalem and the other in Tel Aviv. Right in between the two cities there’s a village called Castel and they move in there together. Usually that’s where love stories end — they live happily ever after. Eshkol Nevo, however, decides to open his novel here, and shows what happens when you decide to build a home together. He asks, ‘How can somebody be in a home without feeling at home? Can you be homesick in your own living room? Can you miss the person you love, when you’re lying next to him in bed?’ I think he does a brilliant job of writing this relationship – the very intimate, sensual and very beautiful relationship of these two students. Nevo also writes about what it means to be homesick from an international aspect. Not far from these two students is a Palestinian worker. He knows that this village used to be an Arab village, which his family fled in the war of ’48. He actually has a key to the family house from ’48. He just looks at the students, at their lives, and he has his own homesickness, which is the national one. We have a 2000-year history of being homesick. Jews were away from Israel, living in the diaspora for so many years. They craved to get back to Israel and they longed for it and they wished for it, and then suddenly they got it. The question is: what happens when you finally get what you want? I think you can get a little bit crazy because there’s this terrible clash between fantasy and real life. It’s like the Odyssey : you have Odysseus’s really long journey to get back to his wife, but then he goes back to the house he left, and he realises this is not the same house, and this is not the same wife, and this is not even the same Odysseus. It was the main reason I wrote the novel. I heard the true story which inspired One Night Markovitch — there really was this operation of Jewish men who went into Europe to save women by marrying them and bringing them to Palestine, where they were then supposed to get divorced, and there really was this man who went all the way to Nazi Europe to rescue a woman, but then refused to give her the divorce when they got to Israel. In Judaism, if you don’t give the woman the divorce—the ‘get’ in Hebrew—then she is forced to stay married. When I heard about this, I thought: wow this is the biggest metaphor for contemporary politics in Israel that I ever heard. This idea that somebody is trying to do something right—and I think an Israeli state is something right—but ends up doing wrong: it ends up holding by force somebody, some territory, or some other people."

"Dorit Rabinyan wrote a beautiful novel about a love affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, and the novel was so good that a committee of professionals asked to put it on the school curriculum. The Education Ministry eventually decided to ban it, however, because they said: this is a love affair between a Palestinian and a Jew, and we are afraid of them because of ‘hitbolelut.’ This is a Hebrew word. In English it means ‘assimilation’, but it is a specific word that we use in Hebrew, which we only use about the assimilation of Jews with other nations. It means that you’re afraid of Jews marrying non-Jews and that then the Jewish religion or culture would be destroyed, because it would be mixed with other cultures. They argued not to have the book taught in schools because it’s not the kind of idea we want to teach our children. “The best way to make a novel a bestseller is to say that nobody should read it” Of course, the best way to make a novel a bestseller is to say that nobody should read it. All the teenagers who never read books said: ‘OK, this is a book that we’re not supposed to read,’ and then they ran to the shops and bought it. The fact that you ban a novel because it deals with a love affair between a Palestinian and a Jew — it is one of those moments where you don’t know whether you’re supposed to laugh or cry. If you think of Romeo and Juliet—the famous example of forbidden love—they both, in a way, give up the whole concept of being a Capulet and a Montague; they just want to be together. What’s so good about All the Rivers is that the characters don’t give up their identity. They’re not saying: oh we don’t care about Israelis and Palestinians, we just love each other. The woman is a Zionist—she wants an Israeli state—and the man cares about Palestinian issues — he wants a Palestinian state. They don’t put aside their political disagreement. They love each other, but they still hold their national identity, which is very complex and very beautiful at the same time. By starting the novel in New York, Dorit Rabinyan set it on neutral ground. It makes them both foreigners — they both have people looking at them because they are of eastern origin, and this is soon after 9/11. They are both the ultimate other for the Americans, and this is something that keeps them together. I don’t think that their relationship could start if he was living in a village near Ramallah and she was in Tel Aviv — then they’d never meet. In Israel, we do have some couples of Palestinians and Jews, it does happen, but it is a forbidden love, an impossible love. Yes, definitely. People understand the power of literature. They understand that Dorit Rabinyan’s novel shows a love affair between people, whom we are taught are enemies. The Palestinian schools teach them that we are the enemy, and our schools teach our kids that they are the enemy. I think the people who are afraid of this novel are the people who understand that literature can change the way people think about things — which is both pessimistic and optimistic. The Hebrew writer Amos Oz once gave a beautiful lecture about this. He said that for years you could read in Hebrew, but only the religious script. He said that Hebrew became alive again the first time somebody wrote a love letter in Hebrew — not a prayer, but a love letter: a boy trying to tell a girl that he wants to be with her. He said that’s the first time that people could really live inside the language. Amos Oz was the first generation of Israeli-born Hebrew writers, and I’m the third generation of Israeli writers, so I was born into Hebrew. For me, this is not such a miracle, this is just the language I was born into. But it does strike me each time I open the Bible that these are the same words. I mean, I am writing the same words that were used 3000 years ago and that is amazing. Right now, while we are talking, it is the middle of the night in Tel Aviv, and I’m sure you have a dozen writers sitting in their apartments, writing novels that will be published in a year from now, and the beautiful thing about literature is that I don’t know what these novels are going to be about. You have this writer right now writing the word ‘end’ at the end of his novel, and none of us knows if this novel will be like the novels that we’ve talked about, or part of the canon, or if it will be something completely different. You can never tell."