A Death in the Family

The last rays of late-summer sunlight filtered through the pine trees of Israel’s national cemetery Tuesday as David Grossman, one of the country’s greatest novelists and a powerful voice for the cause of peace, intoned the Jewish prayer of mourning for his son.

Staff Sgt. Uri Grossman, two weeks from his 21st birthday, was killed Saturday when his tank was hit by a Hezbollah missile in a Lebanese village a few miles from the Israeli border. His death came less than 48 hours before a fragile cease-fire took hold -- and days after his famous father had spoken out against the war.

The sobs of Uri’s younger sister, Ruti, rang out in the still air as she, her father, her mother, Michal, and the Grossmans’ elder son, Yonatan, slowly climbed rough-hewn stone steps behind the coffin draped with Israel’s blue-and-white flag.

“I’m not saying anything about the war right now,” Grossman, pale and slight-looking in a baggy T-shirt and khaki pants, told the crowd of hundreds of mourners at Mt. Herzl, many of them figures from Israel’s literary and artistic aristocracy. “We, our family, have already lost this war.”

Grossman’s novels and nonfiction have been praised for their sensitivity, emotional complexity and historical resonance. The 52-year-old writer has long been regarded by many here as something akin to a national conscience, a role dating to his 1987 book of essays, “The Yellow Wind,” which painted a wrenchingly human portrait of Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied territories.

He took up that public role again last week, when he joined two of Israel’s other best-known authors, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, in issuing a manifesto urging the government to seek a negotiated settlement to the conflict with Hezbollah rather than pursuing a large-scale ground war in southern Lebanon.

Like many Israelis, Grossman believed that Israel was justified in retaliating for the abduction of two soldiers and the deaths of eight more in a cross-border raid by Hezbollah. But as the conflict dragged on, he concluded that peril and suffering on both sides outweighed possible gains.

“Force, in this case, will fan the flames of hatred toward Israel in the region and the entire world, and may even, heaven forbid, create the situation that will bring upon us the next war and push the Middle East into an all-out regional war,” Grossman said at a news conference Thursday in Tel Aviv.

In typically self-effacing fashion, Grossman spoke eloquently of the national interest without mentioning his private fears for his son, who was serving on the front lines.

Uri Grossman, friends and family said, shared his father’s view that Arabs and Jews must find a way to live together.

But like his father, the son of refugees from Nazi-shadowed Europe, he had an unshakable commitment to Zionism and believed that army service was his duty.

The family was worried when he chose to enter the armored corps, but accepted his determination to become a tank commander -- “From childhood you were always like this, with strength from inside you,” Grossman said in his eulogy.

In a prescient op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times six days after the start of the conflict, Grossman wrote that “events of the last few days have shaken everyone awake.”

“The war has reached their doorsteps,” he wrote, and on Saturday it reached his. It was the conflict’s bloodiest day for the Israeli military, with 24 soldiers killed.

Many in the crowd were moved to tears by Ruti and Yonatan Grossman’s tributes to their brother, in which they described a sweet-natured, deeply principled but fun-loving young man.

“My sweet, my soldier, my joy, my brother,” Ruti said in a tear-choked voice. “I miss your hugs, your smelly uniform.... I never believed that I would be burying you.”

Yonatan, who completed his military service a week before his brother was drafted, was traveling in South America when word came that Uri had been killed.

“I thought I’d come back, show him the pictures, introduce him to all my new friends,” he said, his voice faltering only once. “Uri was the best friend and the dearest person in the world.”

Mourners stood in silence but for murmured “Amens” as David Grossman recited the kaddish, or the prayer for the dead. Soldiers in black berets ducked their heads to hide tears.

In the last two decades, Grossman’s novels have been translated into nearly two dozen languages. He won critical acclaim for works such as “See Under: Love,” “Be My Knife” and “Her Body Knows.” The novel “Someone to Run With” has just been made into a film here.

“I can’t even say out loud how much you were ‘someone to run with’ to me,” he said in his eulogy, speaking in a strong but sorrow-cracked voice. “Your short life was good, and I hope I was a worthy father.”

The closest Grossman came to any political commentary were a few elegiac lines that sounded like dialogue one of his characters might have delivered.

“I wish we could all be more gentle toward one another -- that we could heal ourselves from violence,” he said. “Harder times are to come.”