- Person
- David Grossman
- Lived
- b. 1954
- Field
- Novelist and essayist
- From
- Israeli
The story
On 12 August 2006, in the last hours of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, David Grossman's younger son Uri, a twenty-year-old tank commander, was killed in southern Lebanon. Grossman was close to finishing a long novel, To the End of the Land, about a mother's fear for her soldier son, and he completed it after his loss. Then he wrote a different kind of book, one that faced grief directly.
Falling Out of Time was published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014, translated by Jessica Cohen. It is a hybrid of poetry, drama and fiction. A grieving father, known as the Walking Man, leaves his home and begins walking in circles around his town, searching for the place where his dead son has gone. Along the way he is joined by other bereaved parents, each carrying a private loss, and together they walk towards an unknown destination, searching for words for what cannot be said.
Grossman has spoken of the moment he and his wife woke their twelve-year-old daughter to tell her of her brother's death, and of her reply that they would go on living. The book carries that same insistence on life alongside its sorrow, and it also celebrates Uri's life.
The Erasmus Prize Foundation notes that Grossman processed his loss in this book and that it has been adapted for the stage many times. The composer Osvaldo Golijov turned it into a musical drama for the Silkroad Ensemble, which later recorded it. Golijov has described the piece as being about keeping company with people who are isolated in their grief, and the album's notes liken the characters' wandering to a walking shiva, the traditional Jewish week of mourning.
For many readers who have lost a child, Falling Out of Time has become a rare companion, offering language for an experience that often leaves people silent.
Why it matters
Falling Out of Time offers comfort and language to bereaved parents and shows how art can hold unbearable grief.
About David Grossman
Jerusalem novelist of See Under: Love and To the End of the Land, Booker International and Israel Prize winner, and a persistent moral voice for peace and empathy.
More about David Grossman
- David Grossman's See Under: Love reimagined Holocaust memoryDavid Grossman's 1986 novel See Under: Love, about a boy raised among silent Holocaust survivors, became a landmark of Israeli literature about the Shoah.
- David Grossman's Someone to Run With won the Sapir PrizeDavid Grossman's 2000 novel Someone to Run With, about a teenage boy and a runaway girl on the streets of Jerusalem, won Israel's Sapir Prize.
- David Grossman's To the End of the Land won wide acclaimDavid Grossman's 2008 novel To the End of the Land, about a mother walking the Galilee to escape news of her soldier son, won the National Jewish Book Award and the JQ Wingate Prize.
Sources
- David Grossman, Erasmus Prize 2022 Praemium Erasmianum Foundation
- David Grossman Wikipedia
- What Is The Sound Of Grief? Osvaldo Golijov Puts It To Music NPR / WFAE
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