Seven Days: A Diary
October 2001
This article was commissioned by the French newspaper Libération, as part of a series of personal diaries by authors.
Saturday, October 13, 2001
Saturday’s a great day to get your bomb shelter in order. As my wife and I do our best to clear out all the junk that’s piled up there since the last time we thought there’d be a war (it wasn’t that long ago, just a year back, when the Intifada broke out), my young daughter is busy making up the list of friends she wants to invite to her upcoming birthday party. A weighty question: Should she invite Tali, who didn’t invite her to her birthday party? We discuss the problem, trying to mobilize all the gravity it deserves, just so that we can at least keep up an appearance of routine. But the terrorist attacks in the United States have in fact robbed us of that illusion, of the possibility of depending on some sort of logical continuity. A thought is always hovering in the air: Who knows where we will be a month from now.
We already know that our lives will not be as they were before September 11. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, a deep, long crack appeared in the old reality. The muffled roar of everything that might burst out can be heard through the crack — violence, cruelty, fanaticism, and madness. All is suddenly possible. The wish that we might keep what we have, keep up a daily routine, suddenly seems exposed and vulnerable. The effort to maintain some sort of routine now seems so touching, even heroic — to keep family, home, friends together.
We decide to invite Tali.
Sunday
I’m lucky that the suggestion to write this journal came as I was beginning to write a new story. If it weren’t for that, I’m afraid my diary would have been quite melancholy.
Several months have gone by since I finished my last book, and I felt that not writing was having a bad effect on me. When I’m not writing, I have a feeling that I don’t really understand anything. That everything that happens to me, all events and statements and encounters, exist only side by side, without any real contact between them. But the minute I begin writing a new story, everything suddenly becomes intertwined into a single cord; every event feeds into and imbues all other events with life. Every sight I see, every person I meet is a hint that’s been sent to me, waiting for me to decipher it.
I’m writing a story about a man and a woman. That is, it began as a short story about a man alone, but the woman he met, who was supposed to be just a chance passerby who listens to his story, suddenly interests me no less than he does. I wonder if it is correct, from a literary point of view, to get so involved with her. She changes the center of gravity I had planned for the story. She disrupts the delicate balance it requires. Last night I woke up thinking that I ought to take her out entirely and replace her with a different character, someone paler, who wouldn’t overshadow my protagonist. But in the morning, when I saw her in writing, I just couldn’t part with her. At least not before I got to know her a little better. I wrote her all day.
It’s almost midnight. When I write a story, I try to go to sleep with one unfinished idea, an idea I haven’t gotten to the bottom of. The hope is that at night, in my dreams, it will ripen. It is so exhilarating and rejuvenating to have a story help extricate me from the dispassion that life in this disaster zone dooms me to. It’s so good to feel alive again.
Monday
I keep reading hostile remarks about Israel in the European press, even accusations that Israel is responsible for the world’s current plight. It infuriates me to see how eagerly some people use Israel as a scapegoat. As if Israel is the one, simple, almost exclusive reason that justifies the terrorism and hate now targeted against the West. It’s also astounding that Israel was not invited to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition, while Syria and Iran (Syria and Iran!) were.
I feel that these and other events (the Durban conference and its treatment of Israel; anti-Israeli Islamic incitement and racism) are causing a profound realignment in Israelis’ perceptions of themselves. Most Israelis believed that they’d somehow broken free of the tragedy of Jewish fate. Now they feel that that tragedy is once again encompassing them. They’re suddenly aware of how far they still are from the promised land, how widespread stereotypical attitudes about “the Jew” still are, and how common antisemitism is, hiding all too often behind a screen of (supposedly legitimate) extremist anti-Israel sentiments.
I’m highly critical of Israel’s behavior, but in recent weeks I’ve felt that the media’s hostility to it has not been fed solely by the actions of the Sharon government. A person feels such things deeply, under the skin. I feel them with a kind of shiver that runs back to my most primeval memories, to the times when the Jew was not perceived as a human being of flesh and blood but was rather always a symbol of the Other. A parable, or a chilling metaphor. Last night I heard the host of a BBC program end his interview with an Arab spokesman with the following remark (I’m quoting from memory): “So you say that Israel is the cause of all the troubles that are poisoning the world today. Thank you, and I’d like to wish our audience good night.”
Tuesday
For two weeks already there has been a decline of sorts in the level of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. The heart, so accustomed to disappointments, still refuses to be tempted into optimism, but the calm allows me to get absorbed in writing without pangs of conscience. The woman in my story is becoming more of a presence. I haven’t the slightest idea where she is leading me. There’s something bitter and unbounded about her that frightens and attracts me. There’s always that great expectation at the beginning of every story — that the story will surprise me. More than that, I want it to actually betray me. To drag me by the hair, absolutely against my will, into the places that are most dangerous and most frightening for me. I want it to destabilize and dissolve all the comfortable defenses of my life. It must deconstruct me, my relations with my children, my wife, and my parents; with my country, with the society I live in, with my language.
It’s no wonder that it is so hard to get into a new story. My soul is on guard. Like every living thing, it seeks to continue in its movement, in its routine. Why should it take part in this process of self-destruction? What’s wrong with the way it is? Maybe that’s why it takes me a long time to write a novel. As if in the first months I have to remove layer after layer of cataract from my recalcitrant soul.
Wednesday
“The only one smiling is the one who hasn’t heard the latest news.” So wrote Bertolt Brecht. At 7:30 in the morning the radio reports the assassination of Israeli Minister of Tourism Rechavam Ze’evi. Ze’evi was an extremist who advocated transferring the Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I never agreed with his beliefs, but such an act of terrorism is horrible and unjustified. That is also my opinion when Israel murders a Palestinian political figure.
Like every other country, Israel has the right to defend itself when a terrorist bearing a “ticking bomb” is on his way to attack. Rechavam Ze’evi, despite his views, was not a terrorist.
The heart fills with apprehension. Who knows how the situation will deteriorate now. Over the last two days there was relative calm, and we were almost bold enough to resume breathing with both lungs. Now, all at once, it’s as if the trap has closed in on us once again. I am reminded of how easily we can be overcome by the unbearable lightness of death (as I write, I have the feeling that I am documenting the last days before a great catastrophe).