The Lament of David Grossman, a Writer Running Out of Time

At 43, David Grossman is driven by the idea that he is running out of time. “It just becomes worse and worse,” laments the man who is one of Israel’s most prominent writers. “There are so many important questions in my life that I know I’ll never come to understand unless I write about them. Now I know that so many things in my life I will not know,” he says, while in Los Angeles to promote his fourth novel, “The Zigzag Kid” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

As if to highlight this, the table in the author’s room at the Beverly Prescott Hotel is covered with manuscript pages from the novel he has been working on for the last four years.

“The work, the psychology, of the writer,” Grossman points out, “is to take a cliche, and to separate all the fibers of this cliche and make it live again. But when I go out for a tour like this, suddenly I’ve congealed back to the cliche. It’s so rare that you get the feeling in an interview, or even less when you stand in front of an audience, that you can really give your own soul in an intimate way. That’s why I have my book with me.”

The notion of congealing is a powerful one for Grossman, especially when it comes to childhood, which plays a significant role in his work.

“You know,” he says with a laugh, “I hear that there is a cliche here--the inner child. What I think is that it is the other way around, that most of the time the child is left out. So many people I meet are totally congealed as children. They have no contact with the child who they were.”

Much of Grossman’s fiction seeks to reestablish such a connection; his best-known novel, “See Under: Love,” looks at the Holocaust from the perspective of a young boy whose parents are survivors, while “The Book of Intimate Grammar” tells the story of a pre-adolescent boy whose emotional development outpaces his physical growth.

“It was, I think, Rilke who said that ‘childhood is the great museum of our memory,’ ” he suggests, explaining his fixation. “And I do believe it’s right--everything is there. Sometimes, it’s strange why it’s so difficult to penetrate this museum. But I know for sure that even if I write about adults, as I’m doing in this novel that I’m writing now, every adult that I’ll write about, I’m very interested in his relationship with himself as a child.”

Actually, he still looks like something of a kid himself. A slight man, with an edge of excitability, he wears jeans and work boots, and peers through slightly smudged wire-rim glasses, his face framed by a corona of red hair. On the inside, too, he remains wary of adulthood.

“The more I write about it,” he says, “the more I see that we all know how to make the right noises and movements, but it’s very dubious to what extent we are really adults.”

For Grossman, children are complex moral beings in their own right, a point of view he delineates not only in his novels, but also in the 13 children’s books he has published in Israel, as well.

“The children’s books,” he admits, “are more comforting. I want them to be like a literary kiss on the cheek of the child before you send him floating to the night. But I don’t believe you can protect someone from the atrocity of life. On the contrary, I feel that children are almost born with, and in the first years are left or cursed with, a tragic world view. They see things and can’t express them, but when I look at the eyes of my children sometimes, I see them understanding things. And I feel outside them, unable to help them, when they are exposed to some atrocity in reality, some deep injustice in the heart of their world.”

Given this perspective, “The Zigzag Kid” (originally written in Hebrew, as all his books) represents a bit of a departure for Grossman, although he bristles at the characterization. Still, he acknowledges that the novel is far more lighthearted than the darker textures of his previous efforts and says he felt, in writing it, the way “someone would feel when he takes a vacation from himself.”

Originally released in Israel as a work for young adults, “The Zigzag Kid” is a rambunctious, nearly picaresque, adventure story, a modern fairy tale in which 12 1/2-year-old Nonny Feuerberg embarks on a wild goose chase to the very innermost secrets of his identity. Yet if this makes it the most accessible of the author’s full-length books, it is also, on a fundamental level, the most personal, as well.

“I wrote it for my two sons,” Grossman notes, “especially to the elder one before his bar mitzvah. I felt I wanted to give him a present--something to accompany him. Because of that, I think--because I had, finally, a very concrete reader--there is something very intimate in this book from the point of view of a real conversation between a father and a son.”

Where “The Zigzag Kid” also differs from much of Grossman’s fiction is in its evocation of present-day Israel, which, with the exception of his first novel, has been the province of his nonfiction instead. The author of two provocative books about the Palestinian situation, “The Yellow Wind” and “Sleeping on a Wire,” Grossman writes nonfiction with a political agenda, although he approaches the material as he would any book.

“I think it all starts with the need to try to think in your own words,” he says. “Sometimes you do it in fiction, and sometimes you do it in journalism. I wrote those two books about Palestinians because I felt I was out of authentic words to describe what I thought and what I felt, that the government imposed false terminology, imposed narrative on me and supplied me with all kinds of false idioms.”

For Grossman, the situation came to a head during his tenure as anchorman of the main Israeli radio newsmagazine.

“When I was on Israeli radio,” he recalls, “I was unable--not allowed--to say ‘the occupied territories’ or ‘the Palestinian people.’ I used to say every morning, ‘During disturbances, a local youngster has been killed.’ A local--no Palestinian. He had no name, never. Youngster--he could have been 2 or 3 years old--was killed. The passive form is the last shelter of the villain sometimes. Not to tell that we, one of our good guys, took a gun and shot him, it’s heartbreaking. So I had to talk this false language.”

Of course, in the decade or so since Grossman stopped working in radio, Israel has undergone dramatic changes, not least its involvement in a peace process, which his work anticipated. Still, he believes, the process has never recovered from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, which left it in the hands of “violent and irresponsible people on both sides.” Such a failure has undermined a peace in which “we uprooted ourselves from our history, from our psychology, and for the first time we said, ‘We shall re-create our history not as victims. We shall take chances and take calculated risks.’ ”

Now, Grossman says, “we have a prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu, who in my eyes, does not understand the idea of peace, and the concessions one has to make in order to enter this state of mind. Mr. Netanyahu speaks all the time about fighting terrorism. Fighting terrorism is something essential, it is very important. But if you reduce everything to this question, then paradoxically you make yourself hostage to terrorism again. It’s stupidity. You have to fight terrorism, but, on the other hand, you have to create conditions that in the long run will make terrorism almost impossible. It will not stop. I don’t believe it will stop.”

The tragedy of this, in Grossman’s view, has everything to do with time’s passage and the bittersweet impermanence of things.

“In the life of nations,” he says, “it takes centuries to recover from all kinds of trauma. But we are not privileged with centuries. There is not enough time.” To remedy such sentiments, Grossman turns increasingly toward his work.

“You know,” he muses, glancing at his manuscript, “Mozart wrote in his diary, ‘Every night before I go to sleep, I think maybe tomorrow I shall not live anymore.’ And I adopt this way of thinking. Since life is so short, I want to do only the things that are most significant to me. I must do what comes from the inside.”