2024-08-27 23:00:30
At a time when the war in the Gaza Strip is still going on, the Israeli writer David Grossman will receive the German Heinrich Heine Literary Prize. This was reported by the DPA agency. The organizers chose it taking into account the fact that it “appeals for mutual understanding and tolerance in the peace process in the Middle East”.
The name of the laureate was announced by Stephan Keller, the mayor of the German city of Düsseldorf, which awards the prize. It is associated with a reward of 50,000 euros, which translates to about 1.2 million crowns. David Grossman will receive it as “one of the most important voices in Israeli literature”, who also “advocates reconciliation and dialogue” in the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, the mayor reasoned.
The 70-year-old novelist, journalist and peace activist was delighted with the decision. “It’s good news in a time of so much bad news,” he said. The ceremony will take place in December, the organizers have yet to announce the exact date.
Grossman commented on the current situation for the first time several months after the attacks of the Palestinian terrorist movement Hamas on October 7 last year, to which the Jewish state responded with an ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip. “Today, Israel is paying a heavy price for allowing itself to be seduced by a corrupt leadership for years,” he wrote for the Financial Times.
In the article, he described the fact that Israel controls the Palestinian territories as a “crime”, but immediately added that the massacre of hundreds of Israelis, including the elderly and children, by the Palestinians was even more horrific.
“Not even Israel’s behavior and the crimes it has committed in the occupied territories over the past 56 years can justify or mitigate what is fully revealed here: how deeply ingrained is the hatred towards Israel, the painful realization that we Israelis will always have to live in a state of increased vigilance that we will always have to be ready for war,” Grossman lamented.
David Grossman is already the winner of the Man Booker International Prize. | Photo: Claudio Sforza
In the commentary, he further expressed his fear that after the war, Israel will be “even more right-wing, more militant and racist” than before and that it will take years before any reconciliation with the Palestinians can even begin.
Grossman published another text on the current topic this spring in the New York Times. “At the moment, Israel reminds me more of a fortress than a home. It offers neither safety nor comfort,” he stated. He also pointed out that “as a result of the war, a shameful phenomenon has come to light: Israel is the only country in the world that openly calls for its destruction”.
In a text reflecting on how permanently the war had transformed members of both nations, Grossman also called for foreign intervention. “States that have the leverage to put pressure on both sides of the conflict should realize that Israelis and Palestinians can no longer save themselves,” he regretted.
Why tell jokes
After the death of Amos Oz, probably the most famous living Israeli writer, he already holds the German Booksellers’ Peace Prize or the prestigious International Man Booker Prize.
In 2017, Grossman and his English translator received it for the novel Přijde koň do bar. It told the story of a bitter aging stand-up comedian who, instead of an entertaining show, is dealing with life as if on his deathbed in a club. To surprised viewers, he describes his traumatic childhood, terrible coexistence with his parents, or bullying in his teens.
According to Grossman, whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages and the last ones were published in Czech by the Odeon publishing house, a person can not only deal with grief by telling jokes. Above all, he is permanently freed.
“The writer Primo Levi mentioned Jews who told each other jokes in extermination camps. At least for a fraction of a second, they gained freedom by doing so. As if they were telling the world by joking: I am still a free person and I will not let circumstances break me,” he explained in 2018, when he was a guest of the Prague World of Books fair.
Grossman studied philosophy and theater science at the Hebrew University in his native Jerusalem. After military service, he began working in radio, but was fired in 1988 for protesting restrictions imposed on reporters on Palestinian topics.
The dispute specifically revolved around the news that the Palestinian leadership unilaterally declared its own state in November 1988 and for the first time recognized Israel’s right to exist.
Radio management wanted to ignore the message, Grossman was determined to broadcast it. “It was quite scary, my name was on the front pages of newspapers, I was being talked about in parliament. It all taught me a lot about how a large organization can act against an individual,” he recalled for the British newspaper Guardian.
Writer David Grossman in a photo from 2011, when he was a guest at the World of Books fair. | Photo: Lukáš Bíba
Running away from bad news
Grossman has been writing since he was young. His novels about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict probably made him the most famous worldwide.
Already in his debut novel The Smile of the Lamb from the early 1980s, he depicted life in the West Bank under Israeli rule.
He covered the fate of Palestinians in the so-called occupied territories in the reportage collection Yellow Wind, while in the novel Woman flees from the news from 2008, he described what the relatives of soldiers sent to the front feel. The heroine of this story runs away from home to escape bad news about her son participating in a military operation.
Grossman is a long-time critic of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s policy toward the Palestinians in general. Already years ago, the writer joined the opponents of the expansion of Jewish settlements. He speaks out for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and against war with Iran.
His second son, who worked as a tanker, was killed in the war against the Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006. He was 20 years old. He died just two days after David Grossman and his literary colleagues Amos Oz and Avraham Yehoshua held a press conference calling on the Israeli government to end the war.
Since the 1970s, the city of Düsseldorf has been awarding the Heinrich Heine Prize in honor of its famous native, a German novelist and poet of Jewish origin who lived from 1797 to 1856. In the new millennium, the award was received by the Israeli writer Amos Oz, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and most recently the year before Ukrainian novelist Yuri Andruchovych.
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