Hold on to the Sun (23 page)

MG:
It’s a moment of big potential in a life story, of powerful urges and desire, of a vivid encounter with the world of experience and of culture, and the time when the individual personality emerges from a person’s heritage. Cracks and openings occur in your psyche and if you know how to respect and listen to them, they’ll carry you all of your life. My departure from Israel, my going to Paris in the early 70s answered both an unconscious and a conscious need to direct my life in a way that would allow me to listen to these voices, to these urges. Otherwise, they may not have been granted the space they needed.

JM:
This harks back to when we first met in Paris in 1972. Our work on these stories has also been a revelation to me, because in Paris we talked about ideas, we talked about theater; we went to the theater a lot together. We even did theater! But I was unaware of the kinds of things you were writing.You were very secretive about that.

MG:
Because I didn’t take my writing for granted.These short stories are also very moving for me because they represent my determination
to write
. I had a room to myself, a
chambre de bonne
—a very small room—I didn’t know at that time about Virginia Woolf’s notion. But the need to have a room for myself was strong. I also felt I had to camouflage it. Maybe out of insecurity, because who knows if you have the right to claim to be a writer in this world . . . Also, in terms of the subject matter, there was really the danger of exposing something scary about myself.

JM:
So it was easier for you—and for me, I think—to be the good students we’d always been. To talk about our dissertations, our graduate studies, our theater work, while you had this secret writing life.

MG:
Yes, but mind you my dissertation was on a parallel path to the short stories because it took me more and more into Jewish mysticism. That was my way of learning what I felt was needed for my writing career. I used my dissertation to get to what was most important in what I wanted to be in life, which was not a research person, but a writing person.

JM:
Let’s talk about the essays in this volume. In them you speak of going back to Poland, although it’s not that you came from Poland but, rather, that’s where part of your family’s history is. In these journeys you discover your roots; you discover horrors, but also real communities,
especially through art. How do we connect these essays to the stories?

MG:
I’m very happy about these essays being included in this volume because they represent something I mentioned a minute ago—the fomenting of a theme, a life theme that evolves through time.They add a dynamic aspect to the collection. For example, the first essay, “Journey to Poland,” was written in 1975, immediately upon returning from a journey that shattered something I had repressed. But I wrote the framing meditation around it in 1996 when my novel
The Name
was published in English. In the novel, I articulate through fiction this legacy of horror and community. “Facing Evil” and “Migrations of a Melody,” which close the volume, date from 2006 and 2007 when I finally dared to start writing openly my mother’s story. The essays document the ongoing process of how to face something that was denied, a trauma I couldn’t cope with. The urge to go to Poland, which came upon me while I was in Paris, was part of my meeting with Europe. Going to Europe, as I express in the first essay, was meant to be something totally different from what I actually discovered. Being in Paris, on the Rue de Rivoli, and seeing that this was a place where World War II actually took place, made that war—which was so far away looking at it from Israel and from our home where my mother’s silence blocked it—very real. Suddenly I couldn’t run away from it.

JM:
So in Paris you began to understand the historical immediacy and continuing trauma of the Occupation and the Holocaust. I suppose, like me, you were shocked to learn about the number of deportations, some 75,000 French Jews—all that history that the French themselves were just starting to deal with.

MG:
We never spoke about it in Israel. France was “the seat of the Resistance.” We were still very much under the Gaullist myth. But let me place my stories and my first essay against the background of Israeli culture. In Israel, I was a kind of wunderkind, I could have started directing in professional theater before I went to Paris. I was in the right milieu, even for a political career, but I just felt I needed a break. I went to France, with a vague idea of writing about theater and metaphysics. I went in the fall of 72. Nobody could know that the next year would be the Yom Kippur War. We were still in the euphoria of the Six Day War. I recall an image from the last Independence Day before I left for Paris. In Tel Aviv, I saw an army jeep rushing through the city with a flag on top. That image of a military jeep in Tel Aviv, this patriotic image, scared me. I felt it was time to move away, time to go beyond the story in which I’d been raised.

So going to Paris was an opening on many levels. I was breaking away from the expectations and the dominant narrative to look for other things that were hushed up in Israel—the metaphysical, mystical, or religious dimensions
of life. At that time I called them “ethical values,” and felt that they were hidden under a nationalistic, very hedonistic, materialistic, and atheist mindset. So much happened in that year of arriving in Paris . . . I was looking for something I didn’t yet dare name: the Holocaust, the Shoah, which was my mother’s story. And, then, the shtetl, what Judaism was before Zionism. Those erased communities and along with them centuries of Jewish life and great achievements in the Diaspora which were seen by Israeli culture a little bit like jokes, or like fictions by Sholem Aleichem. There was no consciousness that all these places had existed such a short time before. And at that time I saw, really saw, for the first time diaspora Jews who lived elsewhere and were not sinners—as they were made to seem by Zionism—sinners because they hadn’t left everything on the spot and gone to Israel. This was an inconceivable thing in Israeli sensitivity, because by the fact that they’d stayed in the Diaspora, they’d seemed to put our own existence in question.

JM:
You were also coming from a totally different landscape, from the liberated Mediterranean, with its own form of Eros, a secular Sabra, raised in Tel Aviv, with very modern parents. And a resolute determination to be part of the world’s modernity.

MG:
Yes. And to be cultured. I was eager to absorb art, theater, opera. Yet, with the discovery of European culture many things were hovering, which took me time to recognize. Questions of consciousness and responsibility,
and centrally among them was the story of the Holocaust, the question of how it had happened, what had prepared it within this civilization. I see now that I was also coping with my own frightful negation. This has been an ongoing process. But it did start then.

JM:
This might be a difficult thing for young readers to grasp because the Shoah, the Holocaust, is anchored in our consciousness now. But it’s certainly true that in the early 70s, it wasn’t particularly anchored in anybody’s consciousness or, rather, people were not talking about it.

MG:
Indeed. I think, in fact, that there was an awareness of it in the United States earlier than in Israel. In Israel, the negation went on even longer, hidden under official “commemorations,” which were really moments of lip service. But now that the Holocaust is everywhere, there is also a danger of talking too much.

JM:
Of making it banal?

MG:
Some of the modes of commemoration just reiterate a sadistic urge and draw on the same fascination with violence. They totally ignore what was the real experience, and I mean not only the suffering, but also the facing, the coping with evil inside the ghettoes and the camps, those examples of rare humanity inside the horror. This is an experience that can nourish us, because people still face catastrophes. They still face harsh moral decisions in extreme situations. And if we don’t draw lessons from how people cope with
them, if we only tell the story of the violence or the suffering, we miss an invaluable lesson about humanity.

JM:
I’m thinking about where the Holocaust lives in your stories, especially in “La Promenade.” In it we see how survivors filter their experience. So while it’s not a story about horror, it’s a story about how one lives through horror. We see a kind of heroic survival technique and a yearning for something more—or in the case of one of the characters, a frenzy which keeps him from having to look very deeply. Perhaps part of your mother’s story, how she coped or did not cope, and what you saw in her life, had an impact on how you saw those characters and how you wrote that story.

MG:
It did. But the story actually came to me in France on two different occasions when I went to seaside towns on the Atlantic Ocean. The first was during my studies, when a bus full of German war veterans filled the streets. This impression was combined with another one I had when I came back to Paris from Israel in the late 1970s and went away for a weekend to Deauville. I remember walking on the promenade by the ocean, and from far away seeing this group of people. They were immediately recognizable—from the way they walked to the way the women held their purses to their hand gestures. It was clear they were not speaking French.

JM:
So you saw them as Eastern European Jews, probably Israelis?

MG:
Eastern Europeans, not necessarily Israelis. But I felt as though I’d zoomed in to my childhood. And I must confess here that, as I write in the essay “Journey to Poland,” going to my Polish Aunt Tonka’s was very exotic for me and quite frightening. As a child, I was afraid of the Holocaust survivors that my mother met up with in Tel Aviv. My mode of coping was by being very naughty. Something in these people must have touched me, maybe the tragedy, maybe the pain. My rejection made me cruel! Writing the story obliged me to identify with them, to see from within how such people are sealed away from reality, to listen closely to the way they do and don’t express themselves because there was always that silence—to see how memory comes, leaps out constantly, as with the character Lusia, who’s not at all my mother. My mother was a very powerful woman.

JM:
Yes, your mother was tough.

MG:
But at the same time she could subtly change, fall into these reveries. And her face would change completely. As a child, I think I detected those moments because they were the only ones where I really met her, and not just the façade. It was an existential need for me. In that sense maybe Lusia is the incarnation of my mother’s inner self, which most of the time she kept under control.

JM:
Maybe this inner self was more crucial to her having been able to survive the camps than being the “tough cookie” she presented to the world.

MG:
Absolutely. A great Israeli historian, Jacob L.
Talmon, talked to me about survivors when I was directing the J-P Grumberg play about postwar France,
TheWorkshop
. He said that for many of them if they spoke too much, they wouldn’t be able to survive. Not speaking was a way of going on with life.The noisy character in “La Promenade,” Hirshel Feingold, is like those Jews wounded by the war who can’t stop talking, because the moment they stop all the other voices come back. So Hirshel rushes on, he’s successful in business, but he’s a kind of mechanized monster—and a victim as well.

JM:
In my reading of “La Promenade,” I think that Hirshel is the most tragic figure. He’s a grotesque clown, a hypercapitalist whom one can’t like. But he also sets himself up to be destroyed by his daughter to whom he can only give things.

MG:
I know all these characters intimately from my childhood.They haunted me also throughout the writing of my novel,
The Name
. The central character, Amalia, is terribly frightened of them.They embody the unbearable memory from which she keeps running away. But in the end she can see and admit the greatness of what human beings can be beyond their brokenness—even the divinity revealed by the broken soul. Samuel Beckett also helped me understand this.

JM:
How so?

MG:
The Deauville vision happened right after I finished adapting and directing in Jerusalem a world premier of an
early novel of Beckett’s,
Mercier and Camie
r. The characters resemble Gogo and Didi from
Waiting for Godot
, but instead of just sitting and waiting, they walk without arriving. In my adaptation for the theater, I left the narrator on stage and he followed them on a bicycle. They didn’t see him; he saw them. That was a way of placing on stage the presence of several levels of narration.

JM:
Which also means many levels of seeing . . .

MG:
That enable pathos and empathy beyond the comical and the grotesque. You remember I had to get special permission from Beckett to do this adaptation.

JM:
I also remember the description of your meeting with him once you had already directed the play, when you came back to Paris for a visit.

MG:
He summoned me, and we had this very long, very moving conversation. He looked closely at the photographs of my show, and while bringing back to mind this early novel he started telling a childhood memory of his strolling with his father in a landscape that inspired the desolate site where the novel ends. I understood then how much Beckett’s writing was based on real experience, despite the unreal settings. And then, when I spoke of his own directing of
Waiting for Godot
, he started sketching on a cigarette package the actors’ movements on stage.This gave me a rare key to his esthetic and its link to marionette theater. Soon after that, I started writing “La Promenade.” The technique of having the narrator speak about the sea as an objective
correlative, as Eliot would say, as a way of communicating what goes unsaid inside the characters, was my way of dealing delicately with brokenness, a way of not being too graphic or emotional.