Hold on to the Sun (24 page)

JM:
Beckett also uses landscapes and movement to say things without saying them directly.

MG:
And to close the circle, Beckett, who for years was seen as a writer of the “Absurd,” is to my mind a writer who echoes the Holocaust in an extreme way. His biography reveals his direct links to the events. He survived being denounced as a member of the Resistance, and his friend and first translator to French, Alfred Peron, was tortured to death in Mauthausen while forced to recite poetry, very much like the unforgettable scene with Lucky in
Godot
. But for a long time critics avoided looking at the Shoah’s influence on Beckett. I think that’s part of the amnesia that shrouded Europe in the 1950s and 60s when Europe was just coming out of the war. I think that, too, was part of a huge cultural repression.

JM:
I also think that this “forgetting” might have been absolutely necessary in order for France, and for Europe, to get back on its feet. But you have another similarity with Beckett. He doesn’t deal directly with evil. He skirts it. And evil is something you skirt as well.

MG:
I think I’m afraid of evil. Although I’m a strong, tall woman, and I have real physical power, when I feel evil directed at me, I totally panic. It’s become harder and
harder for me to face it, even in writing. Maybe this complicated rapport is also a scar of inherited fear. But I think that in these short stories, in a story like “Between Two and Four,” or “The End of the Pythia,” I do face evil, or at least portray it in complicated ways.

JM:
Very complicated ways. Evil is not monolithic. There’s some communication with it. It doesn’t appear without an invitation, or at least a hesitant nod in its direction.

MG:
You’re touching on something here. I don’t have a stereotype of “evil,” a stock character.

JM:
No, you don’t have a simplified devil.

MG:
Because maybe in a way—and here I am close to Primo Levi, I know there are always grey zones, and that evil also has a human face. Because of that, it’s even more frightening. It’s always a human potential and until it erupts, you can think that a person is “normal.”

Going to Germany for the first time in the 1970s brought this back to me.Who knows how I would have reacted during the War? I recognized that I might have ingredients of evil in myself. I can’t reject it as something that is just “out there.” And living in the midst of the Middle East conflict requires constant vigilance. I was startled to discover that in the
Kabbalah
Evil is one of God’s aspects: “The Other Side.” Its existence and the struggle to dominate it by God and Mankind are an ongoing dynamic process.

JM:
Your stories are not plot driven, and the questions
that you ask are not questions that get answered. Do you think that your experience in Poland, your visit to Auschwitz, your trip to Germany have influenced this kind of open-endedness?

MG:
My trip to Poland was part of the coming to writing. It helped me leave behind the certainties, the big ideologies, and listen to what is underneath, enabling me—and I hope my readers—to see that things are not black and white. I think that’s part of the ethical mission of writing. To ask questions and to let us know that writing is not a closed world. It emerges from life, and it gives us back to life, maybe with a sharper intuition. How dare we have the hubris of answers?

JM:
I’d like now to ask more specific questions about the stories and about the writing. In this collection there are astonishing changes in register. You go from psychological realism in “La Promenade,” to fantastic tales, such as “Hold On to the Sun.” You go from ironic description in tales such as “The End of the Pythia” to mystical ecstasy in “Rites of Spring.” You also experiment with voicing and levels of consciousness, as in “Jet Lag.” There seems to be a real awareness of stylistic experimentation. How were you thinking about the kind of writing you were doing at the time?

MG:
Your question brings us back to my literary masters, voices that gave me the feeling that literature was a force in the world, voices like Kafka, Thomas Mann, Rilke, T.S. Eliot, the Hebrew writer Haim Nachman Bialik, who influenced me tremendously, who was a great poet and, at the same time, a wonderful essay and short story writer with a deeply religious background. Through Bialik, I felt the impact of the Jewish book as a continuation of insights through words. Jewish literature turned to fiction very late, only in the nineteenth century. Poetry and prayer were always there, and of course the Bible as text, and an enormous variety of oral genres, later scripted, such as the Talmud or the Midrash. I think there is something in my experimentation in form and in different modes that stems from the shaky ground of what Jewish fiction is. This brought me later to extreme experiments, such as writing
The Making of the Sea: Chronicle of Exegesis
which has the form of a page of the Talmud with a text in the middle and interpretations on the sides. I was also experimenting in the theater, making theater from Jewish ritual. At the same time, I had studied the modernists, and I think that in many ways I
am
a modernist.

And modernism is an experimentation of what the mind is and how we express the mind through language. Today I find incredible resonances between my search for a poetics and research in neuroscience! I experiment, for
example, with what I call organic writing, something that reverberates in the body of the reader, how through jumps of consciousness enacted in the mind of the reader the reader becomes an actor who performs the text. Like the neuroscientist, the writer with her art forges the tools to make the mind readable, to shape it. My older daughter is now researching the way autistic children draw on preconceived narratives in order to construct their own self. We all, to a certain extent, do that.

JM:
And if we can change the narratives, there’s the potential to change the self.

MG:
Yes, we can transform our life narratives, get free from plots that trap us, open new ways to tell ourselves what is good or bad. That is what a successful psychoanalysis offers—the replacement of a narrative, or a new perspective on it. We cannot live without narratives, and tradition means their transmission.Yet narratives have to be constantly questioned—both ideologies and religious narratives—that’s our role and task as individuals faced with a constantly changing world.

JM:
In working with these translations, I read and reread your texts and I was struck by a certain coherency, despite the formal experimentation. The first aspect of this coherency, which we’ve already hinted at in talking about “La Promenade,” is an extreme sensitivity to light, to the movement of light, and therefore to darkness, to variations
on what one can see as fundamental to setting the mood and to suggesting a character’s reality. Why do you work so much with light?

MG:
Maybe because of my first important memory, which came back again recently when I started to write about my mother. She would come into my childhood room which faced the east. The shutters would still be closed, but through the blinds came a shaft of light, full of these little hovering particles of dust. She would point and say, “Sweetheart, this is light.” I would be totally carried away to somewhere beyond the closed shutters and the room. This penetration by that other place impregnated me with a deep sense of what light is. It’s at the core of my writing. It’s in the psyche of the characters and in the narrating voice. It is amazement.

JM:
Amazement is basic to all of your stories.

MG:
For me, it’s almost a synonym for the writing mode. Amazement crosses your routine and it stops you. In my novel
Snapshots
I even use an “amazement technique.” You’re on the New Jersey turnpike, and suddenly some totally industrial piece of landscape evokes an emotion and you’re reminded of something else and you’re split open. These moments of synesthesia, when the senses all mesh together, heighten your perception and bring us close to ecstasy, to a mystical experience.

JM:
In order to have the necessary tension and excitement for a viable short story, you create very vibrant characters.
They may have moments where they dim, but they are really very alive, awash in desire.

MG:
Something that runs through all my stories is a longing, conscious or unconscious, for those brief revelations of daily life. These are the blessed moments, which can occur outside of any religion or organized belief. They are moments of intense life, of intense memory, pain, yearning, moments of sudden epiphany. They have fascinated me always and they echo closely Hasidic theology, which has a pantheistic thrust.You can find God in a blade of grass. It echoes also that quote from Nicolas Malebranche speaking about Kafka that was quoted by Walter Benjamin and finally by Paul Celan: “Attention is the silent prayer of the soul.”

JM:
But at the same time that there’s this great attention and this constant revelation of surrounding life, there’s also in all your stories a sense of movement.The characters, but also the landscapes, are almost never still, even when they try to be so. They sway, they teeter, they totter—and you know the difficulties we had trying to find the right verbs in English for the verbs in Hebrew that communicate all these motions. But the movement that grabs me in your stories is the inner turmoil, the inability to rest, the electric quality of nature and human beings constantly striving, transforming, never at peace.

MG:
“La Promenade”—its ironic title drawn from the name of the fictional café—has that connotation of movement
to it, of people who keep on keeping on, who go on being those who are placeless or have been . . .

JM:
Exiled. Aren’t we back to the notion of the wanderer?

MG:
Of the wanderer. Of the exiled. I think that’s something I wasn’t consciously aware of. That’s part of the unconscious level of writing. But I think now that it’s also part of my exiting from a certain Israeli culture that pretended: “We’ve finally arrived. We’re at The Place.” By uprooting my characters from this certainty of place, they begin to long to be part of a landscape.

JM:
And they long for different stories, but also for a place of plenitude and peace.

MG:
I think that is what I sensed and sense even today about Israeli culture, that (to paraphrase a metaphor of the great poet Yehuda Amichai) the liquid is still shaking in the vessels, vessels which had been uprooted and re-rooted but were still shaking, still being formed.

JM:
This also goes back to writing through the body, and wanting to make fictional bodies resonate and reverberate in the minds and the bodies of the readers. Because you are also a very physical writer.Your characters are walking, or they’re riding bikes; they’re traveling in a plane; they’re dancing, or they’re capering foolishly.

MG:
Experiencing through the body is something very central for me. I don’t know if it has to do with being a woman writer. But I feel the need to locate the mind in a
way that the body not only expresses it, but even foresees it—as if when you do something it has already been enacted unconsciously in parts of your being that are considered less “intelligent.”You’ve experienced the rush of the blood, the perspiration, the heart pangs, and then the thought comes out. Zooming into this dark zone for a fraction of a second always attracted me as revelatory of the impulses that set in motion how we act and how we react.

JM:
Your experience as a theater person, and your appreciation of the stories you physically performed at the Lecoq school when you were in Paris have no doubt reinforced this centrality of the body. In theater, for an actor to put forth the truth of a human being, it has to be through the body.

MG:
True. And just like not starting a rehearsal without a physical warm-up, I won’t start a morning of writing without warming up, because I know I write from the body as well. And from theater I know that personal expression comes mainly from body movement, body language, and not from what you say.

JM:
Can we talk about the place of the uncanny in your work? While we’ve arranged your stories according to their degree of departure from the conventions of realism, there are obvious portents and magical signs in even some of the more realistic portraits. In “Elijah’s Sabbath Days,” for example, there are dreamscapes that tell us other truths, contradictory, troubling truths. I’m wondering to
what extent these different levels of possibility, these ways of making animate what is normally inanimate, are projections against the incursion of death, which is, of course, how Freud postulates the uncanny.

MG:
I don’t think I’ve experienced these stories as facing death. I would even say I don’t feel I’ve dared touch this subject in my writing in a direct way until very recently. Maybe rather than death and the uncanny, there is in my stories a realm of being that’s different from what is usually connoted as “being.” The character Berenov and the people of the island in “Rites of Spring” experience death as a mystical moment of bliss. Maybe that’s a way of running away from death . . .

JM:
Or maybe it’s a different way of understanding death.

MG:
Or aspiring to something else. I think what you call “uncanny” was my way of dealing with the beyond.With what is beyond material reality.

JM:
Perhaps the uncanny is the wrong term. But there is a fantastical weirdness in your character Berenov turning into a tree, for example, in his becoming living vegetation.

MG:
That was, I suspect, my way of coping with old age. I wrote that when my father started to grow old. I think I was working through the decaying of the body, and the freedom of the emotions, of the soul, in a decaying body. Berenov permits himself to succumb to something that was always there, like a call—and he blooms in a certain way. A sudden
bloom because he gives in to an inner urge that he’d been repressing all those years. In Hasidic thought there is this moment of ecstasy when the soul leaves the body to cleave with that which is beyond it. It can occur in the moment you say, “Hear, Oh Israel.” I was very much immersed at the time of writing “Rites of Spring” in that way of Hassidic thinking. I could see these moments of disappearance as a reversal into something extremely positive. Let me tell you the anecdote of sending “Rites of Spring” from Paris to Tel Aviv. I was terrified by how my parents were going to read it, and what they were going to think about their daughter, whom they had sent to do her PhD in Paris, sending them back this strange story about a man who gropes about in the toilet and . . .