Sarah A Smith
Children of War
To the End of the Land
By David Grossman (Translated by Jessica Cohen)
(Jonathan Cape 575pp £18.99)
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What story would a modern-day Scheherazade tell? For David Grossman, the answer is compelling: she tells the story of her fractured land, Israel, through the prism of her family. And the reason she tells it is not to save herself, but to save her second son: a soldier who, at the end of his military service, has signed up at the start of the second intifada for a final operation.
In To the End of the Land, Grossman's Scheherazade is middle-aged Ora, and her audience is Avram, her one-time lover and the estranged father of her soldier son Ofer. The setting is the Israel Trail, a long-distance path running the length of the country. For Ora, the walk is an escape. She reasons that by leaving her home in Jerusalem she can forestall Ofer's death: if she is not there to receive bad news, then it cannot happen. For Avram it becomes a way of reconnecting with life and finding out about his son.
Over the course of their walk, Grossman unravels Ora's story, moving backwards and forwards across time and landscape as she meanders through the details she must impart to Avram. Thus we learn not just about Ofer but about her first son, Adam; her troubled marriage to Ilan (once Avram's best friend); Ilan's efforts to save Avram during the Yom Kippur War; and the obsessive terror that life during 'the situation', as Ora and Ilan call it, has engendered in her.
Most of all, however, we learn about family and its immense importance in Ora's life: at one point, she describes herself as feeling 'embosomed' within it. What is striking about this is not her recollection of the moment that Ofer discovered his toes, or any other details from his childhood, charming as all of these are, but her recreation of life with her sons in adulthood. It is a passionate and intimate portrait, encompassing her animal pride in the two, her meddlesome anguish at their life as soldiers (she attempts at one point to get Ofer to promise 'never to hurt' the enemy), and her feeling that she acts as both a 'cesspit' and a 'lightning rod' for the family's tensions. There is much for any parent and child to recognise here.
Grossman is a writer of huge ability and ambition, as readers of his masterful novel about the Holocaust, See Under: Love, can testify. After working on a more domestic scale, in works such as Be My Knife, he has written a far more wide-ranging book in To the End of the Land. Politics has a very human face here. We see it in the farcical collapse of Ora's friendship with the family's Arab taxi driver when she unthinkingly asks him to drive Ofer to the start of his next campaign; in the heroine's furious sense that her family has been 'nationalised' by the country's leaders; and in the racism that spills out of her as she panics about what the future will bring for her sons.
But this isn't the limit of Grossman's aspiration. The book is sown through with moments of black irony: the lots that Avram and Ilan urged an unsuspecting Ora to draw to see who would be sent home from Sinai (and thus avoid the worst of the Yom Kippur War); the pact that Ora and Ilan make to save the horribly injured Avram, which becomes a burden on their own lives; these all add a tragic dimension. And in Ora, a woman who buries her face in earth in a delirious fit of anticipated grief, he has created an infuriating, beguiling character who lingers in the reader's memory.
Grossman sets up his greatest challenge in the story that Ora must recount. Struggling to define exactly what she can achieve in her conversation with Avram, she wails inwardly: 'How can you even describe and revive a whole person, flesh and blood, with only words - oh God, with only words?' This is, of course, every writer's task and the driving force behind this extraordinary book: how do you give a memory permanence, how do you give a person's life meaning?
Perhaps Grossman does not quite achieve his objectives. Some aspects of the story are rushed; for example, the reference to the internal dialogue that Avram must live through as a result of his experience in the Sinai desert is all too brief. Others are too oblique, such as 'the incident' in which Ofer is involved during his army service. But there is no doubting the author's skill in evoking a mother's love - and anguish - in creating what Ora terms 'a eulogy for the family that once was, that will never be again'.
There is another sense in which this book is a eulogy. Grossman's own second-born son, Uri, was killed during military service at the close of the Second Lebanon War. The novel was started three years before Uri's death, and Grossman writes in an epilogue: 'I had the feeling - or rather, a wish - that the book I was writing would protect him.' Afterwards, he suggests, 'what changed ... was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written'. I am not sure if it is the 'echo of reality' or David Grossman's undoubted skill (or both), but this very fine book stands as a testament to love and to family.