A Writer Walks Into a Bar, and Israel Celebrates

(Bloomberg View) -- It doesn’t happen often, but Israel’s headlines allowed themselves a moment of national pride when David Grossman, one of the country’s leading novelists, won the Man Booker International Prize for his novel “A Horse Walks Into a Bar.” As Haaretz celebrated, Grossman, long-known for his left-leaning politics, was “the first Israeli to win the prize, one of the most important annual literary awards,” for fiction translated in to English.

Even newspapers on the far right celebrated the extraordinary accomplishment. Israel Hayom, the controversial Sheldon Adelson-backed paper widely seen as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, boasted that Grossman’s “works have been translated into 36 languages” and listed his many international awards.

Why, though, does a literary award become leading national news? The answer lies in the unparalleled role literature plays in Israeli society.

Like Shai Agnon (winner of Israel’s first Nobel prize and the only Israeli to win the prize for literature) before him, Grossman acknowledged that his award said much not only about his own talents, but also about the extraordinary project that Zionism -- the re-creation of the Jewish people in its ancestral homeland -- has been. Agnon, in his 1966 Stockholm speech, famously began by saying, “As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile. But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” The Nobel went, he said, to a person whose personal story was that of the Jewish people, returning to the land from which it had been exiled.

Grossman, too, pointed to the rebirth of the Jewish people, this time through its Hebrew language. The prize is “a great sign of honor to our language,” he said. “Since it was a dormant language for something like 1,800 years, it is such a phenomenon that in the last 120 years the Hebrew language has been revitalized” and, like the Jewish people, “awakened from its long sleep.”

It is in literature that Israelis conduct their most profound conversations about what is happening to them, particularly given the derailed peace process.

Grossman’s novel unfolds over the course of one evening as a standup comedian’s performance leads the audience in unanticipated directions. The comedian’s personal story is not overtly national, but the context of his desperate search for meaning, his guilt over having chosen to “save” one loved one over another, the novel’s preoccupation with opportunities squandered and the audience’s periodic cries of “no politics tonight” make it clear that Grossman is speaking not only about a man but also a society.

The book’s last lines leave no doubt that this is his intention. “This concludes the ceremony. Please be careful on your way out. Pay attention to the ushers and security personnel,” is language every Israeli recognizes as the conclusion of annual nationally televised memorial ceremonies for Holocaust victims and fallen soldiers. In Israel’s greatest literature, the boundary between the personal and the national has been intentionally blurred.

Amos Oz was also shortlisted for the prize this year for “Judas.” (Israelis noted that having two of the six finalists for the prize was an extraordinary accomplishment for a country with a population approximately the same as New York City.) “Judas” centers on three people living in a house in the shadow of the death of a young soldier, years earlier, in the War of Independence. Interwoven throughout the novel is one of the characters’ musings on the New Testament figure Judas, symbolic of the ultimate betrayer. What if Judas did not mean to kill Jesus, the character wonders. What if Judas was so convinced of Jesus’s divinity that turning him in to the Romans was meant to afford him an opportunity to reveal his miracle-making, not to kill him?

If so, though, Judas fails. Certain that Jesus could not die, Judas accidentally brings about his death. In what ways, Oz wonders along with many Israelis, does our ideological passion kill what we love most?

Similar is Grossman’s earlier novel “To the End of the Land,” in which a mother flees her home so that the soldiers whose job it is to inform families that their sons have been killed will not be able to find her. It’s magical thinking, of course, but that’s the point. The desperation to keep their sons alive has led many Israelis to magical thinking -- which in the end cannot work. What made the book even more heartbreaking was that Grossman’s son Uri was killed in the last hours of the 2006 Lebanon War, when a cease-fire had already been negotiated, just as his father was completing work on the book.

The national introspection is apparent throughout Israeli literature. Eshkol Nevo’s 2011 novel “Neuland” (New Land) is an obvious play on Theodor Herzl’s 1902 utopian novel “Altneuland” (Old-New Land). But if Herzl, who launched political Zionism in 1896, foresaw a perfected future, Nevo writes about Israelis who decide to create a new Jewish State, this time in South America. They have not given up on the idea of a Jewish State, but they have despaired of the one in which they were raised. “Is it ever too late to start over?” Nevo wonders.

Stuck in the abyss of a conflict they do not know how to end, many Israelis are asking themselves the same question.

Israel today is commonly portrayed as ossified by conflict, heels dug in, unthinking about its future. But Netanyahu and the politicians do not reflect the “real” Israel, its writers insist. Out of the headlines, Israeli society is deeply reflective, often consumed by doubt, questioning the very ideological passion that made the state possible.

That was why, battered and increasingly delegitimized, Israelis relished the recognition of Grossman and all that he represents. It was a much needed moment for shared pride, across a political spectrum that rarely has cause to unite.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Daniel Gordis is senior vice president and Koret distinguished fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem. Author of 11 books, his latest is "Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn."

To contact the author of this story: Daniel Gordis at danielgordis@outlook.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net.

For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.