David Grossman's Reading List

"Sholem Aleichem was born in 1855 in Ukraine and he is among the three founding fathers of Yiddish literature of the 19th century. He is undoubtedly the greatest Jewish humourist. He is unique in his ability to document and enliven the lives of millions of Jews who lived in the little towns and villages in Eastern Europe, the shtetls. He is most well-known for writing the story on which Fiddler on the Roof was based, but he has many other characters that are vivid and unique, but also symbols for certain prototypes of Jewish society at that time. When I was eight years old my father entered my room one day, and I remember that he had an untypical smile—a little embarrassed and exposed—and he gave me a small red covered book and said, “Read it, this is how it used to be over there.” I don’t know how, but I felt that he had given me a gift that would reveal something about his childhood, in a small Galician town. My father rarely spoke about his childhood, and he gave me Sholem Aleichem to speak for him, to tell me his own story. The book was called Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son. I inhaled it, driven by deep curiosity and passion to know my father as a child. And really he gave me the key not only for his own childhood but to a whole reality that I knew nothing about. “I remember the shock—every child has their first dead and for me it was the characters of Sholem Aleichem” I was a first generation Israeli, the Israeli of the early 1960s—young, daring, militant, facing the future, and very reluctant to look back at the Jewish diaspora of Sholem Aleichem. But for me the book was an open channel to be simultaneously in Israel and with the diaspora. I read all six volumes of stories by Sholem Aleichem—as a child today would read Harry Potter . I discovered a whole reality, codes, a language, professions. What did I know about people that drew water from wells? About matchmakers? About non-Jews that surrounded the shtetl? Of the air of mystery and danger that enveloped the Jews there? Since I was the only child in my class who knew about Sholem Aleichem, it became an intimate secret for me since I realised quickly that reading Sholem Aleichem was not cool enough. Then one day on Holocaust Memorial Day, we were ordered to come in black trousers and white shirts and stand upright and listen to the clichés of the schoolmaster that meant very little to us—the number six million is not understandable for a child. It takes one Anna Frank to bring up the horror. Suddenly, on the boiling asphalt of the school yard, I understood that the victims are all people I know very well from the stories of Sholem Aleichem. I remember the shock. I was sure that shtetl life existed in parallel to my life—every child has their first dead and for me it was the characters of Sholem Aleichem. The story Menachem Mendel is a fascinating one. Menachem Mendel is a young Jewish man who leaves his wife and children behind in the shtetl and he goes to the big city to make big money—he is a person of great dreams and no talent for reality. He is so naïve, and maybe even stupid and definitely a fantasist. Whatever he tries, someone cheats him; but he keeps writing letters to his wife filled with dreams and illusions, and we see the catastrophe coming. She, the wife, is down to earth, sober, the expert of reality, feeding, dressing, caring for the children. She is warning him again and again of his drunkenness for fast enrichment. To me the stories of Sholem Aleichem are always about the Jew who suffers first and foremost from the fact that he has no home, who does not find a place for himself—always a foreigner. This is the real tragedy of Jews—as a collective and as individuals—that we never really felt at home in the world, though Israel is meant to be that home. It is so heart-breaking to think that after 70 years of sovereignty we still do not have this solidity of existence that we so need. When I write for children I write as me but from a different place in myself. I try to look for the channel from me today to the child I was, to the childhood of my children. I will tell you a story: when my eldest son Yonatan was three years old, I put him to bed one night and I mentioned that this night—the 21st of December—is the longest night of the year. I covered him, kissed him good night, and went to do my things. At five in the morning he burst into our bedroom, agitated, crying that the night is over, and only then did I understand what it is to be a child and not to know that the sun will rise again. For him the night was eternal….the sun rising is such a triumph! Since then, when I write for children, I want to be in this fragile point, not knowing if the sun is rising tomorrow—that everything can surprise you. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I always ask parents to read stories every night to children before bedtime, and when I write my stories I think of this family moment when parents and child are together and the child cuddles with the father or mother who reads the story and sometimes these stories can give place and legitimacy to things that do not exists in that family—a certain language, humour, imagination. Even babies can recognise the “voice of the story” transferring them to another sphere that is different from their everydayness. When my father read to me, suddenly I was able to grasp a sparkle of my authoritative father as a child. For a child the night can be frightening: darkness, shadows, things look different, and they are alone while everyone else is active. Maybe the child gets a glimpse of life before he came into the world. Nights are also dreams and nightmares and the child cannot understand why the parent does not come in to protect him. I want the story to be a kiss on the cheek of the child before he goes off for the journey of the night."

"Bruno Schultz was a Jewish, Polish writer, who lived in Drohobych, a small town in Galicia. He was a modest artist, regarded today as one of the greatest 20th-century writers. He said that our everyday life and our art consist of fragments of old legends, artefacts of ancient cults, crumbs of mythology. He described the small life of his modest family as a rudiment of such mythology. He compared human language to a huge primal snake which was cut into thousands of pieces (the words) that have lost their ancient vitality, that today have the function of communication only, but still always continue “to look for each other in the dark”. Every writer knows the magical moments of putting two words together, when suddenly there is a spark, and you know that these words were neighbours in Schultz’s ancient snake. His novel, The Messiah , is unfinished and lost, but he wrote several stories where, on reading them, life explodes; in every paragraph there is a simultaneous occurrence of all layers of consciousness and sub-consciousness, of dream and nightmare, of fantasy. My first time reading Schultz’s work was “Cinnamon Shops” (collected in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories ). I was captivated. I felt like I was in a dream, in total madness. I felt like everyone in love feels: that these words were meant only for me… Only later did I realise he was beloved by others who discovered him years before. In the epilogue to the book, I learned about the story of his death. In the ghetto, he was enslaved by a Nazi named Landau, who made him draw murals at his home; another Nazi officer, named Gunther, after losing a card game to Landau, shot Schultz, just to hurt Landau. When they met later, he told Landau: “I’ve killed your Jew,” and Landau answered: “so now I’ll kill your Jew”. True? Imagined? I believe it is made up, but this tale has a power that has lasted for years. After I read it I walked for hours as if in a fog not wanting to live in a world that allows such monstrosities as these sentences. This time, unlike the paralysis of a ten-year-old reading Sholem Aleichem, I had already started to write and wanted to write about Bruno Schultz: a book that would shiver on the shelf, that would have the vitality of one second of human life, the vitality that Bruno Schultz teaches us in his writing. “After I read it I walked for hours as if in a fog not wanting to live in a world that allows such monstrosities as these sentences” What had such an impact on me is the clash between the vitality of the multi-layered, energetic writing of Bruno Schultz versus the sterile equations of the Nazis—you kill my Jew, I kill your Jew—as if human beings can be replaced by each other. Writing about him, giving him a second life, was the only possible way to stand in front of the paralysis that human evil cast on me. In my books often characters face some kind of arbitrariness: of Nazis, of our body on our soul, military occupation, and above all—the arbitrariness of death. I found out that whenever I wrote about arbitrariness, I stopped being the passive and paralysed victim—I am not in the place where I was before I wrote about it."

"I was a young soldier on an abandoned mountain in Sinai, in 1973. It was 41 degrees Celsius, and I was reading about a holiday evening dinner, with duck on the table and snow outside. It was so far away from me, an Irish home, all so foreign and unfamiliar. I was fascinated by it. It is the perfect story—you can almost touch the characters, and yet it is told from a remote point of view, from a distance but not without affection. Anyone who writes knows how difficult it is to find the perfect distance. The ending of the story is heart-breaking: the scene when Gabriel, so full of love and passion, is convinced that he and his wife Gretta will make love later that night. And as she starts speaking about the young man she loved he realises he never really knew his wife and how stupid and shallow he was in her eyes…. How little do we know about the people we are so close to? There is always this air of mystery; something will remain enigmatic. And now, years after my first reading of this book, I can see that behind every human story is another and yet another…this is the human archaeology. A good story that radiates layer upon layer, and each acts on us without our knowledge."

"The story is about a family vacation. The narrator, his wife and two young children—all German—travel to the town of Torre di Venere, a little town in Italy, in the 1920s. It begins with joy and enthusiasm and quickly deteriorates when the family meets the phenomena of Italian nationalism and Fascism. At the centre of the story is a hypnotists’s performance that ends in an unexpected and tragic way. The main character is the strange and arrogant hypnotist, Cipolla, an expert in taking over people’s will power and subjugating their minds to him. The subtext of the story is (of course) Fascism and the wish of people to give up their free will and deposit it into hands of authority, let it be the Duce, or Cipolla. The mechanism of turning towards fanaticism and Fascism is the same in 1926 as in 2017. The more confusing and violent the world becomes, people are more eager to find shelter in superficiality and to identify with and even assimilate into an imagined strong and “Fatherly” personality. Cipolla wouldn’t allow anyone to share the stage with him. He is a hunchback, a repulsive, ugly person in appearance and mannerism, in his vanity, in the deep contempt in which he holds the audience. But I think his power comes from the feeling that there is a struggle inside himself… his personality is a permanent inner battle. This is what attracts us as spectators, as readers, to such a show: that we are allowed to peep into the hell of another human being—it is, of course, an irresistible temptation."

"Morante creates the story of the mother, Ida, and the child Useppe (a nickname for Giuseppe) born during the Second World War, the outcome of a rape by a German soldier. Useppe is the sweetest child ever described in a book. He keeps his joy of life amidst the atrocities around him. You see the unbearable contradiction between the nature of war and the fragility of a family. Morante opposes the anonymity of war—the war of masses, states, armies, troops—to the individual, to the uniqueness of Ida, Useppe and Bella their dog. “The great power of literature—as opposed to the power of mass media—is that if 1,000 people read the same book, the book reads each of them differently” This is what literature is about—a commitment to the individual. There is the terrible sentence by Stalin, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” Literature tries to redeem the tragic life of the individual from the anonymous statistic of Stalin. The great power of literature—as opposed to the power of mass media where ten million watch a reality programme and are almost glued together with kitsch and self-righteous sentimentality—is that if 1,000 people read the same book, the book reads each of them differently. La Storia is special in its mixture of imagination and facts and the orders of the German army and history books and the pamphlets of anarchists and the sweetness of the child who is feeling, in a primal way, when there is danger or evil. The not-so-detached story teller is the voice of a woman. Maybe it is Morante herself, who bestows goodness and a benevolent motherly hand, who leads us through the atrocities, with a sober voice and a lamenting reality. All this has just reminded me of the time I met the mayor of Rome and I told him that next to the sculpture of Romulus and Remus they should make one of Ida and Useppe."