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More Than I Love My Life

A novel

Part of Vintage International

Author David Grossman
Translated by Jessica Cohen
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$17.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Jul 12, 2022 | 288 Pages | 978-0-593-31259-9
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  • English > Comparative Literature: Middle Eastern and North African > Israeli
  • Interdisciplinary Studies > Race and Ethnic Studies > Jewish Literature and Drama
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INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE 

Here is a remarkable novel of suffering, love, and healing—the story of three generations of women on an unlikely journey to a Croatian island and a secret that needs to be told.

More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each mother and daughter pair, though Gili—abandoned by Nina when she was just three—has always been close to her grandmother.
 
With Gili making the arrangements, they travel together to Goli Otok, a barren island off the coast of Croatia, where Vera was imprisoned and tortured for three years as a young wife after she refused to betray her husband and denounce him as an enemy of the people. This unlikely journey—filtered through the lens of Gili’s camera, as she seeks to make a film that might help explain her life—lays bare the intertwining of fear, love, and mercy, and the complex overlapping demands of romantic and parental passion.
 
More Than I Love My Life was inspired by the true story of one of David Grossman’s longtime confidantes, a woman who, in the early 1950s, was held on the notorious Goli Otok (“the Adriatic Alcatraz”). With flashbacks to the stalwart Vera protecting what was most precious on the wretched rock where she was held, and Grossman’s fearless examination of the human heart, this swift novel is a thrilling addition to the oeuvre of one of our greatest living novelists, whose revered moral voice continues to resonate around the world.

“Cast[s] a spell that lingers. . . . Grossman’s evocative gifts are in full force [and] his understanding of the opaque ways of love—sometimes subterranean, often unexpected or arbitrary—is unmatched. . . . [His] novels have a cumulative power that subsumes mere plausibility. He succeeds in transcending the permutations of his plots and the localness of his settings—indeed, to make deliberate use of the Israeli template—to create themes of loss, the redemptive power of love, the immutable scars of history and the consoling effect of humor that resonate well beyond the world of the kibbutz or the background of the Holocaust. . . . To read [Grossman] is to understand that there is a world beyond the political, even in these re-tribalized times, one in which there is room for recognition, however incomplete and often painful, of who we are in our own eyes and in one another’s.” —Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Reivew
 
“A somber and affecting tale without recourse to undue melodrama or psychobabble. This delicately crafted novel, crisply translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, is a fitting tribute to his friend.” —Houman Barekat, The Sunday Times (London)

“Another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you’ll read this year. . . . A book of secrets wrapped within secrets. . . . It is a love story, a story about a family and their myriad individual tragedies. But it is also about the way that the personal can never be wholly separated from the political, about the lingering wounds of history, about how violence seeps into all the dark corners of a life. It is, in the end, about Israel.  . . . Immaculately translated by Jessica Cohen.” —Alex Preston, The Observer

“Concisely devastating. . . . A powerful retelling of a Jewish woman’s extraordinary life. . . . A story so emotionally, ideologically and morally complex that it takes all of Grossman’s considerable skills to render . . . He has demonstrated again that the novel—elastic, expansive, amenable to painful fragmentation—can provide a space for the most harrowing and resistant material.” —Alex Clark, The Guardian

“Tender and disquieting. . . . Grossman shines a light on the victims of the violent split between Tito and Stalin, as well as on the stories people tell themselves to explain, survive, and forgive. And in Vera, who is nimble and sharp at 90, endlessly self-mythologizing, and possessed of a broken Hebrew that Cohen renders into idiosyncratic broken English, the author has created an unforgettable character. This adds another remarkable achievement to Grossman’s long list.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The undeniable moral strength of his voice is informed by a sharp awareness of the complex treacheries of the last century; it also accepts its responsibility to battle against attempts to forget or minimize those traumas.” —Susan Miron, The Arts Fuse

“Powerful. . . . Grossman performs a deft exploration of how trauma impacts succeeding generations.” —Kristine Huntley, Booklist
Rafael was fifteen years old when his mother died and put him out of her misery. Rain poured down on the mourn-ers huddled under umbrellas in the small kibbutz cemetery. Tuvia, Rafael’s father, sobbed bitterly. He had cared for his wife devotedly for years and now looked lost and bereft. Rafael, wearing shorts, stood apart from the others and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his eyes so that no one would know he wasn’t crying. He thought: Now that she’s dead, she can see all the things I thought of her.

That was in the winter of 1962. A year later his father met Vera Novak, who had come to Israel from Yugoslavia, and they became a couple. Vera had arrived with her only daughter, Nina, a tall, fair- haired girl of seventeen whose long face, which was pale and very beautiful, showed almost no expression.

The boys in Rafael’s class called Nina “Sphinx.” They would sneak behind her and mimic her gait, the way she hugged her body and stared ahead vacantly. When she once caught two kids imitating her, she simply pummeled them bloody. They’d never seen such fighting on the kibbutz. It was hard to believe how much ferocious strength she had in her thin arms and legs. Rumors started flying. They said that while her mother was a political prisoner in the Gulag, little Nina had lived on the streets. The streets, they said, with a meaningful look. They said that in Belgrade she’d joined a gang of feral kids who kidnapped children for ransom. That’s what they said. People say things.

The fight, as well as other incidents and rumors, failed to pierce the fog in which Rafael lived after his mother’s death. For months he was in a self-induced coma. Twice a day, morning and evening, he took a powerful sleeping pill from his mother’s medicine cabi-net. He didn’t even notice Nina when he occasionally ran into her around the kibbutz.

But one evening, about six months after his mother died, he was taking a shortcut through the avocado orchard to the gym-nasium when Nina came toward him. She walked with her head bowed, hugging herself as if everything around her was cold. Rafael stopped, tensing up for reasons he did not understand. Nina was in her own world and did not notice him. He saw the way she moved. That was his first impression: her quiet, sparing motion. The lim-pid, high forehead, and a thin blue dress that fluttered halfway down her shins.

The expression on his face when he recounted—

Only when they got closer did Rafael see that she was crying— quiet, muffled sobs—and then she noticed him and stopped, and curved inward. Their gazes entangled fleetingly and, one might sorrowfully add, inextricably. “The sky, the earth, the trees,” Rafael told me, “I don’t know . . . I felt like nature had passed out.”

Nina was the first to recover. She gave an angry puff and hurried away. He had time to glimpse her face, which had instantly shed all expression, and something inside him coursed toward her. He held out his hand after her.

I can actually see him standing there with his hand out.

And that is how he’s remained, with the outstretched hand, for forty- five years.

But that day, in the orchard, without thinking, before he could hesitate and trip himself up, he sprinted after her to tell her what he’d understood the moment he’d seen her. Everything had come to life inside him, he told me. I asked him to explain. He mumbled something about all the things that had fallen asleep in him during the years of his mother’s illness, and even more so after her death. Now it was all suddenly urgent and fateful, and he had no doubt that Nina would yield to him right then and there.

Nina heard his footsteps chasing her. She stopped, turned around, and slowly surveyed him. “What is it?” she barked into his face. He flinched, shocked by her beauty and perhaps also by her coarseness—and mostly, I’m afraid, by the combination of the two. That’s something he still has: a weakness for women with a bit—just a drop—of aggression and even crudeness. That spiciness. Rafael, Rafi—

Nina put her hands on her waist, and a tough street girl jutted out. Her nostrils widened, she sniffed him, and Rafael saw a delicate blue vein throbbing on her neck, and his lips suddenly hurt; that’s what he told me: they were literally stinging and thirsting.

Okay, I get it, I thought. I don’t need the details.

Tears were still glistening on Nina’s cheeks, but her eyes were cold and serpentine. “Go home, boy,” she said, and he shook his head no. She slowly moved her forehead toward his head, tracking it back and forth as if searching for precisely the right point, and he shut his eyes and then she butted, and he flew back and landed in the hollow of an avocado tree.

“Ettinger cultivar,” he specified the name of the tree when he told me the story, so that I wouldn’t forget, God forbid, that every detail in the scene was important, because that is how you construct a mythology.

Stunned, he lay in the hollow, touched the bump already grow-ing on his forehead, then stood up dizzily. Since his mother’s death, Rafael had not touched anyone, nor had he been touched, except by the kids who fought with him. But this, he sensed, was something different. She’d come along to finally open up his mind and rescue him from the torture. Through the blinding pain, he shouted out what he had realized the moment he’d seen her, though he was amazed when the words left his mouth, insipid and crude. “Words the guys used,” he told me, “like ‘I wanna fuck you,’ that kind of thing.” So different from his pure, scrupulous thought. “But for a second or two I saw on her face that, despite the dirty language, she got me.”

And maybe that is what happened—how should I know? Why not give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that a girl born in Yugoslavia, who for a few years really was, as it later turned out, an abandoned child with no mother or father, could—despite those opening stats, or perhaps because of them—at a moment of kind-ness glance into the eyes of an Israeli kibbutz kid, an inward-looking boy, or so I imagine him at sixteen, a lonely boy full of secrets and intricate calculations and grand gestures that no one in the world knew about. A sad, gloomy boy, but so handsome you could cry.

Rafael, my father.

There’s a well-known film, I can’t remember what it’s called right now (and I’m not wasting a second on Google), where the hero goes back to the past to repair something, to prevent a world war or something like that. What I wouldn’t give to return to the past just to prevent those two from ever meeting.

Over the days and, mostly, the nights that came afterward, Rafael tormented himself about the marvelous moment he’d squandered. He stopped taking his mother’s sleeping pills so that he could experience the love unclouded. He searched all over the kibbutz, but he could not find her. In those days he hardly spoke to anyone, so he did not know that Nina had left the singles’ neighborhood, where she’d lived with her mother, and expropriated a little room in a moldering old shack from back in the founders’ days. The shack was like a train of tiny rooms, located behind the orchards, in an area that the kibbutzniks, with their typical sensitivity, called the leper colony. It was a small community of men and women, mostly vol-unteers from overseas, misfits who hung around without contribut-ing anything, and the kibbutz didn’t know what to do with them.

But the notion that had germinated in Rafael when he met Nina in the orchard was no less impassioned, and it wrapped itself tighter and tighter around his soul by the day: If Nina agrees to sleep with me, even once, he thought in all earnestness, her expressions will come back.

He told me about that thought during a conversation we filmed an eternity ago, when he was thirty-seven. It was my debut film, and this morning, twenty-four years after shooting it, we decided, Rafael and I, in a burst of reckless nostalgia, to sit down and watch it. At that point in the film he can be seen coughing, almost chok-ing, scouring his scruffy beard, unfastening and refastening his leather watch strap, and, above all, not looking up at the young interviewer: me.

“I have to say, you were very self-confident at sixteen,” I can be heard chirping ingratiatingly. “Me?” the Rafael in the film responds in surprise. “Self-confident? I was shaking like a leaf.” “Well, in my opinion,” says the interviewer, sounding horribly off-key, “it’s the most original pickup line I’ve ever heard.”

I was fifteen when I interviewed him, and for the sake of full disclosure I should say that until that moment I had never had the good fortune to hear any pickup line, original or trite, from anyone other than me-in-the-mirror with a black beret and a mysterious scarf covering half my face.

A videotape, a small tripod, a microphone covered with disinte-grated gray foam. This week, in October of 2008, my grandmother Vera found them in a cardboard box in her storage attic, along with the ancient Sony through which I viewed the world in those days.

Okay, to call that thing a film is somewhat generous. It was a few haphazard and poorly edited segments of my father reminiscing. The sound is awful, the picture is faded and grainy, but you can usually figure out what’s going on. On the cardboard box, Vera had written in black marker: gili — various. I have no words to describe what that film does to me, and how my heart goes out to the girl I used to be, who looks—I’m not exaggerating—like the human ver-sion of a dodo, an animal that would have died of embarrassment had it not gone extinct. In other words, a creature profoundly out of whack in terms of what it is and where it’s headed—everything was up for grabs.

Today, twenty-four years after I filmed that conversation, as I sit watching it with my dad at Vera’s house on the kibbutz, I feel amazed by how exposed I was, even though I was only the interviewer and hardly ever appeared on-screen.

For quite a number of minutes I can’t concentrate on what my father is saying about him and Nina, about how they met and how he loved her. Instead I sit here next to him, folding over and shrinking back beneath the force of that internal conflict, projected unfiltered, like a scream, from inside the girl I used to be. I can see the terror in her eyes because everything is so open, too open, even questions like: How much life force does she contain, or how much of a woman will she be and how much of a man. At fifteen she still does not know which fate will be decided for her in the dungeons of evolution.

If I could make a brief appearance—this is what I think—just for a moment, in her world, and show her pictures of myself today, like of me at work or me with Meir, even now, in our state, and if I could tell her: Don’t worry, kid, in the end—with a couple of shoves, a few compromises, a little humor, some constructive self-destruction— you will find your place, a place that will be only yours, and you will even find love, because there will be someone who is looking for an ample woman with an air of the dodo about her.
Copyright © 2021 by David Grossman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
  • LONGLIST | 2022
    Man Booker International Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2022
    Man Booker International Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2022
    Man Booker International Prize
© Claudio Sforza
DAVID GROSSMAN was born in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and has been translated into more than forty languages. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome's Premio per la Pace e l'Azione Umanitaria, the Premio Ischia International Journalism Award, Israel's EMET Prize, the Man Booker International Prize, and the Albatross Prize given by the Günter Grass Foundation. He lives in Jerusalem. View titles by David Grossman

About

INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE 

Here is a remarkable novel of suffering, love, and healing—the story of three generations of women on an unlikely journey to a Croatian island and a secret that needs to be told.

More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each mother and daughter pair, though Gili—abandoned by Nina when she was just three—has always been close to her grandmother.
 
With Gili making the arrangements, they travel together to Goli Otok, a barren island off the coast of Croatia, where Vera was imprisoned and tortured for three years as a young wife after she refused to betray her husband and denounce him as an enemy of the people. This unlikely journey—filtered through the lens of Gili’s camera, as she seeks to make a film that might help explain her life—lays bare the intertwining of fear, love, and mercy, and the complex overlapping demands of romantic and parental passion.
 
More Than I Love My Life was inspired by the true story of one of David Grossman’s longtime confidantes, a woman who, in the early 1950s, was held on the notorious Goli Otok (“the Adriatic Alcatraz”). With flashbacks to the stalwart Vera protecting what was most precious on the wretched rock where she was held, and Grossman’s fearless examination of the human heart, this swift novel is a thrilling addition to the oeuvre of one of our greatest living novelists, whose revered moral voice continues to resonate around the world.

“Cast[s] a spell that lingers. . . . Grossman’s evocative gifts are in full force [and] his understanding of the opaque ways of love—sometimes subterranean, often unexpected or arbitrary—is unmatched. . . . [His] novels have a cumulative power that subsumes mere plausibility. He succeeds in transcending the permutations of his plots and the localness of his settings—indeed, to make deliberate use of the Israeli template—to create themes of loss, the redemptive power of love, the immutable scars of history and the consoling effect of humor that resonate well beyond the world of the kibbutz or the background of the Holocaust. . . . To read [Grossman] is to understand that there is a world beyond the political, even in these re-tribalized times, one in which there is room for recognition, however incomplete and often painful, of who we are in our own eyes and in one another’s.” —Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Reivew
 
“A somber and affecting tale without recourse to undue melodrama or psychobabble. This delicately crafted novel, crisply translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, is a fitting tribute to his friend.” —Houman Barekat, The Sunday Times (London)

“Another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you’ll read this year. . . . A book of secrets wrapped within secrets. . . . It is a love story, a story about a family and their myriad individual tragedies. But it is also about the way that the personal can never be wholly separated from the political, about the lingering wounds of history, about how violence seeps into all the dark corners of a life. It is, in the end, about Israel.  . . . Immaculately translated by Jessica Cohen.” —Alex Preston, The Observer

“Concisely devastating. . . . A powerful retelling of a Jewish woman’s extraordinary life. . . . A story so emotionally, ideologically and morally complex that it takes all of Grossman’s considerable skills to render . . . He has demonstrated again that the novel—elastic, expansive, amenable to painful fragmentation—can provide a space for the most harrowing and resistant material.” —Alex Clark, The Guardian

“Tender and disquieting. . . . Grossman shines a light on the victims of the violent split between Tito and Stalin, as well as on the stories people tell themselves to explain, survive, and forgive. And in Vera, who is nimble and sharp at 90, endlessly self-mythologizing, and possessed of a broken Hebrew that Cohen renders into idiosyncratic broken English, the author has created an unforgettable character. This adds another remarkable achievement to Grossman’s long list.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The undeniable moral strength of his voice is informed by a sharp awareness of the complex treacheries of the last century; it also accepts its responsibility to battle against attempts to forget or minimize those traumas.” —Susan Miron, The Arts Fuse

“Powerful. . . . Grossman performs a deft exploration of how trauma impacts succeeding generations.” —Kristine Huntley, Booklist

Excerpt

Rafael was fifteen years old when his mother died and put him out of her misery. Rain poured down on the mourn-ers huddled under umbrellas in the small kibbutz cemetery. Tuvia, Rafael’s father, sobbed bitterly. He had cared for his wife devotedly for years and now looked lost and bereft. Rafael, wearing shorts, stood apart from the others and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his eyes so that no one would know he wasn’t crying. He thought: Now that she’s dead, she can see all the things I thought of her.

That was in the winter of 1962. A year later his father met Vera Novak, who had come to Israel from Yugoslavia, and they became a couple. Vera had arrived with her only daughter, Nina, a tall, fair- haired girl of seventeen whose long face, which was pale and very beautiful, showed almost no expression.

The boys in Rafael’s class called Nina “Sphinx.” They would sneak behind her and mimic her gait, the way she hugged her body and stared ahead vacantly. When she once caught two kids imitating her, she simply pummeled them bloody. They’d never seen such fighting on the kibbutz. It was hard to believe how much ferocious strength she had in her thin arms and legs. Rumors started flying. They said that while her mother was a political prisoner in the Gulag, little Nina had lived on the streets. The streets, they said, with a meaningful look. They said that in Belgrade she’d joined a gang of feral kids who kidnapped children for ransom. That’s what they said. People say things.

The fight, as well as other incidents and rumors, failed to pierce the fog in which Rafael lived after his mother’s death. For months he was in a self-induced coma. Twice a day, morning and evening, he took a powerful sleeping pill from his mother’s medicine cabi-net. He didn’t even notice Nina when he occasionally ran into her around the kibbutz.

But one evening, about six months after his mother died, he was taking a shortcut through the avocado orchard to the gym-nasium when Nina came toward him. She walked with her head bowed, hugging herself as if everything around her was cold. Rafael stopped, tensing up for reasons he did not understand. Nina was in her own world and did not notice him. He saw the way she moved. That was his first impression: her quiet, sparing motion. The lim-pid, high forehead, and a thin blue dress that fluttered halfway down her shins.

The expression on his face when he recounted—

Only when they got closer did Rafael see that she was crying— quiet, muffled sobs—and then she noticed him and stopped, and curved inward. Their gazes entangled fleetingly and, one might sorrowfully add, inextricably. “The sky, the earth, the trees,” Rafael told me, “I don’t know . . . I felt like nature had passed out.”

Nina was the first to recover. She gave an angry puff and hurried away. He had time to glimpse her face, which had instantly shed all expression, and something inside him coursed toward her. He held out his hand after her.

I can actually see him standing there with his hand out.

And that is how he’s remained, with the outstretched hand, for forty- five years.

But that day, in the orchard, without thinking, before he could hesitate and trip himself up, he sprinted after her to tell her what he’d understood the moment he’d seen her. Everything had come to life inside him, he told me. I asked him to explain. He mumbled something about all the things that had fallen asleep in him during the years of his mother’s illness, and even more so after her death. Now it was all suddenly urgent and fateful, and he had no doubt that Nina would yield to him right then and there.

Nina heard his footsteps chasing her. She stopped, turned around, and slowly surveyed him. “What is it?” she barked into his face. He flinched, shocked by her beauty and perhaps also by her coarseness—and mostly, I’m afraid, by the combination of the two. That’s something he still has: a weakness for women with a bit—just a drop—of aggression and even crudeness. That spiciness. Rafael, Rafi—

Nina put her hands on her waist, and a tough street girl jutted out. Her nostrils widened, she sniffed him, and Rafael saw a delicate blue vein throbbing on her neck, and his lips suddenly hurt; that’s what he told me: they were literally stinging and thirsting.

Okay, I get it, I thought. I don’t need the details.

Tears were still glistening on Nina’s cheeks, but her eyes were cold and serpentine. “Go home, boy,” she said, and he shook his head no. She slowly moved her forehead toward his head, tracking it back and forth as if searching for precisely the right point, and he shut his eyes and then she butted, and he flew back and landed in the hollow of an avocado tree.

“Ettinger cultivar,” he specified the name of the tree when he told me the story, so that I wouldn’t forget, God forbid, that every detail in the scene was important, because that is how you construct a mythology.

Stunned, he lay in the hollow, touched the bump already grow-ing on his forehead, then stood up dizzily. Since his mother’s death, Rafael had not touched anyone, nor had he been touched, except by the kids who fought with him. But this, he sensed, was something different. She’d come along to finally open up his mind and rescue him from the torture. Through the blinding pain, he shouted out what he had realized the moment he’d seen her, though he was amazed when the words left his mouth, insipid and crude. “Words the guys used,” he told me, “like ‘I wanna fuck you,’ that kind of thing.” So different from his pure, scrupulous thought. “But for a second or two I saw on her face that, despite the dirty language, she got me.”

And maybe that is what happened—how should I know? Why not give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that a girl born in Yugoslavia, who for a few years really was, as it later turned out, an abandoned child with no mother or father, could—despite those opening stats, or perhaps because of them—at a moment of kind-ness glance into the eyes of an Israeli kibbutz kid, an inward-looking boy, or so I imagine him at sixteen, a lonely boy full of secrets and intricate calculations and grand gestures that no one in the world knew about. A sad, gloomy boy, but so handsome you could cry.

Rafael, my father.

There’s a well-known film, I can’t remember what it’s called right now (and I’m not wasting a second on Google), where the hero goes back to the past to repair something, to prevent a world war or something like that. What I wouldn’t give to return to the past just to prevent those two from ever meeting.

Over the days and, mostly, the nights that came afterward, Rafael tormented himself about the marvelous moment he’d squandered. He stopped taking his mother’s sleeping pills so that he could experience the love unclouded. He searched all over the kibbutz, but he could not find her. In those days he hardly spoke to anyone, so he did not know that Nina had left the singles’ neighborhood, where she’d lived with her mother, and expropriated a little room in a moldering old shack from back in the founders’ days. The shack was like a train of tiny rooms, located behind the orchards, in an area that the kibbutzniks, with their typical sensitivity, called the leper colony. It was a small community of men and women, mostly vol-unteers from overseas, misfits who hung around without contribut-ing anything, and the kibbutz didn’t know what to do with them.

But the notion that had germinated in Rafael when he met Nina in the orchard was no less impassioned, and it wrapped itself tighter and tighter around his soul by the day: If Nina agrees to sleep with me, even once, he thought in all earnestness, her expressions will come back.

He told me about that thought during a conversation we filmed an eternity ago, when he was thirty-seven. It was my debut film, and this morning, twenty-four years after shooting it, we decided, Rafael and I, in a burst of reckless nostalgia, to sit down and watch it. At that point in the film he can be seen coughing, almost chok-ing, scouring his scruffy beard, unfastening and refastening his leather watch strap, and, above all, not looking up at the young interviewer: me.

“I have to say, you were very self-confident at sixteen,” I can be heard chirping ingratiatingly. “Me?” the Rafael in the film responds in surprise. “Self-confident? I was shaking like a leaf.” “Well, in my opinion,” says the interviewer, sounding horribly off-key, “it’s the most original pickup line I’ve ever heard.”

I was fifteen when I interviewed him, and for the sake of full disclosure I should say that until that moment I had never had the good fortune to hear any pickup line, original or trite, from anyone other than me-in-the-mirror with a black beret and a mysterious scarf covering half my face.

A videotape, a small tripod, a microphone covered with disinte-grated gray foam. This week, in October of 2008, my grandmother Vera found them in a cardboard box in her storage attic, along with the ancient Sony through which I viewed the world in those days.

Okay, to call that thing a film is somewhat generous. It was a few haphazard and poorly edited segments of my father reminiscing. The sound is awful, the picture is faded and grainy, but you can usually figure out what’s going on. On the cardboard box, Vera had written in black marker: gili — various. I have no words to describe what that film does to me, and how my heart goes out to the girl I used to be, who looks—I’m not exaggerating—like the human ver-sion of a dodo, an animal that would have died of embarrassment had it not gone extinct. In other words, a creature profoundly out of whack in terms of what it is and where it’s headed—everything was up for grabs.

Today, twenty-four years after I filmed that conversation, as I sit watching it with my dad at Vera’s house on the kibbutz, I feel amazed by how exposed I was, even though I was only the interviewer and hardly ever appeared on-screen.

For quite a number of minutes I can’t concentrate on what my father is saying about him and Nina, about how they met and how he loved her. Instead I sit here next to him, folding over and shrinking back beneath the force of that internal conflict, projected unfiltered, like a scream, from inside the girl I used to be. I can see the terror in her eyes because everything is so open, too open, even questions like: How much life force does she contain, or how much of a woman will she be and how much of a man. At fifteen she still does not know which fate will be decided for her in the dungeons of evolution.

If I could make a brief appearance—this is what I think—just for a moment, in her world, and show her pictures of myself today, like of me at work or me with Meir, even now, in our state, and if I could tell her: Don’t worry, kid, in the end—with a couple of shoves, a few compromises, a little humor, some constructive self-destruction— you will find your place, a place that will be only yours, and you will even find love, because there will be someone who is looking for an ample woman with an air of the dodo about her.
Copyright © 2021 by David Grossman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Awards

  • LONGLIST | 2022
    Man Booker International Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2022
    Man Booker International Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2022
    Man Booker International Prize

Author

© Claudio Sforza
DAVID GROSSMAN was born in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and has been translated into more than forty languages. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome's Premio per la Pace e l'Azione Umanitaria, the Premio Ischia International Journalism Award, Israel's EMET Prize, the Man Booker International Prize, and the Albatross Prize given by the Günter Grass Foundation. He lives in Jerusalem. View titles by David Grossman

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  • The Wapshot Chronicle
    The Wapshot Chronicle
    John Cheever
    978-0-593-08177-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 02, 2021
  • The Wapshot Scandal
    The Wapshot Scandal
    John Cheever
    978-0-593-31289-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 02, 2021
  • Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
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    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-593-31085-4
    $25.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 27, 2020
  • The Scandal of the Century
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    And Other Writings
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-525-56680-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2020
  • Personal Writings
    Personal Writings
    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56721-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 04, 2020
  • Berta Isla
    Berta Isla
    A novel
    Javier Marías
    978-0-525-56312-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Life for Sale
    Life for Sale
    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-56514-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 07, 2020
  • The Source of Self-Regard
    The Source of Self-Regard
    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-525-56279-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 14, 2020
  • Love Is Blind
    Love Is Blind
    A novel
    William Boyd
    978-0-525-56444-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 24, 2019
  • So Much Life Left Over
    So Much Life Left Over
    A Novel
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-0-525-56441-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 09, 2019
  • Myra Breckinridge
    Myra Breckinridge
    Gore Vidal
    978-0-525-56650-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 21, 2019
  • Warlight
    Warlight
    Michael Ondaatje
    978-0-525-56296-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 02, 2019
  • First Person
    First Person
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-525-43577-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 05, 2019
  • The Only Story
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    A novel
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-525-56306-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 05, 2019
  • A Long Way from Home
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    Peter Carey
    978-0-525-43599-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 05, 2019
  • The Rub of Time
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    Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
    Martin Amis
    978-1-4000-9599-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 22, 2019
  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-1-101-91118-1
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 08, 2019
  • The Frolic of the Beasts
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    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-43415-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 27, 2018
  • The Myth of Sisyphus
    The Myth of Sisyphus
    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56445-4
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 06, 2018
  • Dinner at the Center of the Earth
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    Nathan Englander
    978-0-525-43404-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2018
  • Between Eternities
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    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    978-1-101-97211-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 28, 2018
  • A Boy in Winter
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    A Novel
    Rachel Seiffert
    978-0-8041-6880-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 10, 2018
  • The Red-Haired Woman
    The Red-Haired Woman
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-1-101-97423-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 10, 2018
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Stories
    Haruki Murakami
    978-1-101-97452-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 01, 2018
  • The Golden Legend
    The Golden Legend
    A novel
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-1-101-97338-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 24, 2018
  • The Woman on the Stairs
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    A Novel
    Bernhard Schlink
    978-1-101-91234-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 20, 2018
  • A Horse Walks Into a Bar
    A Horse Walks Into a Bar
    A novel
    David Grossman
    978-1-101-97349-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 16, 2018
  • South and West
    South and West
    From a Notebook
    Joan Didion
    978-0-525-43419-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 02, 2018
  • Letters to Véra
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    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-47658-6
    $24.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 12, 2017
  • House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
    House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
    Yasunari Kawabata
    978-0-525-43414-6
    $9.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Dec 12, 2017
  • The Boat Rocker
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    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    978-0-8041-7037-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 17, 2017
  • Absolutely on Music
    Absolutely on Music
    Conversations
    Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa
    978-0-8041-7372-8
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 03, 2017
  • The Spy
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    A Novel of Mata Hari
    Paulo Coelho
    978-0-525-43279-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 27, 2017
  • Keeping an Eye Open
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    Essays on Art
    Julian Barnes
    978-1-101-87337-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2017
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    A Novel
    Julian Barnes
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    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2017
  • I Am Not Your Negro
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    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
    James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
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    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 07, 2017
  • A Decent Ride
    A Decent Ride
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    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2017
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    A Romance
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    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 10, 2017
  • Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition)
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    Three Stories That Inspired the Movie
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    $7.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Dec 13, 2016
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    Notwithstanding
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    978-1-101-96987-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 18, 2016
  • A Strangeness in My Mind
    A Strangeness in My Mind
    A novel
    Orhan Pamuk
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    $17.95 US
    Paperback
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    Sep 20, 2016
  • The Blue Guitar
    The Blue Guitar
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    978-0-8041-7361-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 09, 2016
  • The Dust That Falls from Dreams
    The Dust That Falls from Dreams
    A Novel
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-1-101-97000-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 26, 2016
  • Wind/Pinball
    Wind/Pinball
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    978-0-8041-7014-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 03, 2016
  • England and Other Stories
    England and Other Stories
    Graham Swift
    978-1-101-87238-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 19, 2016
  • Odysseus Abroad
    Odysseus Abroad
    A novel
    Amit Chaudhuri
    978-1-101-97145-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 09, 2016
  • God Help the Child
    God Help the Child
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-307-74092-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 26, 2016
  • The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
    The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
    Irvine Welsh
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    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 12, 2016
  • The Buried Giant
    The Buried Giant
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    978-0-307-45579-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2016
  • Amnesia
    Amnesia
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    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 08, 2015
  • Family Furnishings
    Family Furnishings
    Selected Stories, 1995-2014
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    978-1-101-87235-2
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    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2015
  • A Wilderness Station
    A Wilderness Station
    Selected Stories, 1968-1994
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    Paperback
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    Paperback
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    Paperback
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    Paperback
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    May 05, 2015
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    Vintage
    Apr 14, 2015
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    Paperback
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    Dec 02, 2014
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    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Dec 02, 2014
  • The Man of Feeling
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    Paperback
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  • Levels of Life
    Levels of Life
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    Paperback
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    Jul 01, 2014
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    Beer in the Snooker Club
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    Paperback
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