The Last Resistance by Jacqueline Rose

Author:Jacqueline Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

And then: ‘All of a sudden, from all corners of the yard, even from the dance floor, rose the roar: ‘Fuck the plan.’ Grossman is devoted to his country, but on condition, it seems, that it reach beyond just about every definition it has ever offered of itself.

Gradually, or rather between the lines, a very different voice can be read from the one that tolls Israel’s fulfilment of its worst destiny. This is the voice of Grossman, writer of brilliant fictions which ‘dissolve’ and ‘destabilise’ every best defence of his life. Fiction is not consoling: ‘it is his very freedom that deprives an artist of comforting illusions’. This makes fiction, intolerably, like war. But it also saves: ‘When I write, for a moment I am not a victim.’ Writing is a cure for dispassion that makes him feel alive again: ‘an act of self-definition in a situation that literally threatens to obliterate me’. Above all, literature forces you into other people’s minds (Yair’s fierce and clumsy accosting of Miriam becomes a metaphor for writing). It forces you to connect. Jerusalem is a city with a centre for lost dogs but not for missing children – it was partly to expose this brute fact about modern life in Israel that Grossman wrote this latest novel. If Tamar saves her own soul, it is not only by saving her brother, but by singing – in a voice that triumphantly swells with its own fear – to strangers on the street: ‘I don’t have the courage to do this. I am not capable of giving myself up like this, to strangers.’ She does. And because she does, and does it so well, her plan to find her brother works. She is picked out and carted off by the criminals who have taken possession of all the child artists of the city, including her brother.

In his fiction, Grossman forces his characters to perform rites of entry that they cannot bear. Everyone goes a bit too far – geographically, physically, psychologically, or all three – as if his fictional characters were atoning for the blindness, or disconnection, of the nation (ignorance and intimacy as the opposite ends of the same pole). ‘I must enter the vortex of my greatest fear and repulsion’, he wrote as he made his way to the refugee camps in 1988. ‘Make room for them within us. How does one do that? It is precisely the thing that we, the majority, forbid them with such deft determination’, he asked again in 1993, this time in relation to the Arab Israelis. This is not a call for empathy, but for something closer. A counter to ignorance, but also an alternative to the deadly forms of proximity that characterise a state of war. War after all brings people together like nothing else. Grossman is striving for such intimacy but in a new form. Not by breaking bones – ‘Break their bones’, Rabin famously cried at the time of the first intifada, as Grossman recalls in Death as a Way of Life.

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