- Person
- David Grossman
- Lived
- b. 1954
- Field
- Novelist and essayist
- From
- Israeli
The story
In May 2003, while his elder son Yonatan was serving in the Israel Defense Forces, David Grossman began a novel about the fears of families whose loved ones are sent into combat. Its heroine is Ora, a recently divorced Jerusalem physiotherapist in her early fifties. Her son Ofer has just finished three years of military service when, in the spring of 2002, the army launches a major operation in the West Bank and he volunteers to rejoin his unit.
Unable to bear waiting at home for the officers who might knock on her door with news of his death, Ora flees. She sets off on the hike across the Galilee she had planned to take with Ofer, refusing to listen to the news, and tells the story of her son's life as she walks, as if the telling could keep him safe. With her goes Avram, Ofer's biological father, a man broken by torture as a prisoner of war in 1973. Through long flashbacks the novel returns to 1967, when the teenage Ora met Avram and Ilan, her future husband, in a hospital isolation ward and began a lifelong love triangle.
Grossman had largely completed the book by August 2006, when his younger son, Uri, was killed in the Second Lebanon War. He finished it after his loss. Published in Hebrew in 2008 under a title meaning A Woman Flees a Message, and in English in 2010 in Jessica Cohen's translation, it became one of the most acclaimed Israeli novels of the century, a vast portrait of family life lived under the shadow of war. Translating it was a considerable challenge, because the Hebrew is full of puns and allusions to the Bible and modern Hebrew literature.
The novel won the Albatros Literaturpreis for its German translation and the National Jewish Book Award in 2010, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the JQ Wingate Prize and, in French, the Prix Médicis étranger in 2011. In August 2011 President Barack Obama took it with him on vacation.
Readers in many countries have found in Ora a universal figure: a mother trying to protect her child from forces she cannot control.
Why it matters
To the End of the Land gave readers worldwide an intimate understanding of what decades of conflict mean for Israeli families.
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 wrote Falling Out of Time on griefDavid Grossman's Falling Out of Time, a work of prose and verse about parents mourning their children, has been adapted for the stage many times.
- 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.
Sources
- David Grossman Wikipedia
- To the End of the Land Wikipedia
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