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Ora, amiddle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer's release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the 'notifiers' who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit. Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days' leave being offered by their commander - a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as a POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy. Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Their walk has a 'war and peace' rhythm, as their conversation places the most hideous trials of war next to the daily joys and anguish of raising children. Never have we seen so clearly the reality and surrealityof daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, and the burdens that fall on each generation anew.
Grossman's rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great antiwar novels of our time.
About the author
David Grossman, 1954 in Jerusalem geboren, ein dezidierter Verfechter einer friedlichen Lösung des Nahostkonflikts, gehört wegen seiner differenzierten politischen Haltung und ungewöhnlichen Erzählphantasie zu den herausragenden Schriftstellern der jüngeren Generation.§David Grossman hat für seine schriftstellerisches Werk und sein politisches Engagement zahlreiche Auszeichnungen erhalten, u. a. den Nelly-Sachs-Preis (1991), den Premio Mondello (Italien, 1996) und den Geschwister-Scholl-Preis (2008). 2010 wird ihm der Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels verliehen.§David Grossman ist verheiratet und hat drei Kinder, er lebt in Mevaseret Zion, einem Vorort von Jerusalem.
Report
Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being
