Writing in the Dark by Grossman David

Author:Grossman, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, New York, April 24, 2007

Individual Language and Mass Language

To open the International Literature Festival Berlin as an Israeli author is not only a great honor, but also a conjuncture that would have been unthinkable until not so many years ago, and even today I cannot be indifferent to its significance.

Despite the close relationship between Israel and Germany today—and between Israelis and Germans, between Jews and Germans—even now there is a place in one’s mind and in one’s heart where certain statements must be filtered through the prisms of time and memory to be refracted into the entire spectrum of colors and shades. As I stand here before you in Berlin, I cannot help but begin with the thoughts that are constantly refracted within me, in that prism of time and memory.

I was born and raised in Jerusalem, in a neighborhood and in a family in which people could not even utter the word “Germany.” They found it difficult to say “Holocaust” too, and spoke only of “what happened over there.”

It is interesting to note that in Hebrew, Yiddish, and every other language they speak, when Jewish people refer to the Holocaust, they tend to talk about “what happened over there,” whereas non-Jews usually speak in terms of “what happened then.” There is a vast difference between “there” and “then.” “Then” means in the past tense; “then” enfolds within it something that happened and ended, and is no longer. While “there,” conversely, suggests that somewhere out there, in the distance, the thing that happened is still occurring, constantly growing stronger alongside our daily lives, and that it may re-erupt. It is not decisively over. Certainly not for us, the Jews.

As a child, I often heard the term “the Nazi beast,” and when I asked the adults who this beast was, they refused to tell me, and said there were things a child should not know. Years later, I wrote in See Under: Love about Momik, the son of Holocaust survivors who never tell him what really happened to them “Over There.” The frightened Momik imagines the Nazi beast as a monster that controlled a land called “Over There,” where it tortured the people Momik loves and did things to them that hurt them forever and denied them the ability to live a full life.

When I was four or five, I heard for the first time of Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter. I felt a great sense of relief: Finally, I thought, there is someone courageous enough to fight the beast, even willing to hunt it down! Had I known how to write at the time, I might have written Wiesenthal a letter full of the detailed and practical questions that were preoccupying me, because I imagined that this hunter probably knew everything about his prey.

My generation, the children of the early 1950s in Israel, lived in a thick and densely populated silence. In my neighborhood, people screamed every night from their nightmares. More

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