Literature and reality – art and war, if that doesn’t sound too cynical – have rarely collided with such force as in David Grossman’s critically acclaimed, profoundly impressive novel. In 2006 the Israeli author’s youngest son dies in action during the last hours of the Lebanon War. The book’s central motif is repeated in reality… Ora, the woman who flees a message, tells the story of her love for two men, of anger and tenderness, despair and passion, and of her son Ofer, who volunteers for a military operation on the West Bank. Ora starts moving; she refuses to passively accept fate but rather seeks to keep her son alive for herself through recollection and narration. She hopes to avert the impending disaster by going to tell her childhood friend Avram, who was a soldier during the Six-Day War, of Ofer’s plans. And to be out of reach in case the disaster occurs. Grossman also follows the pathways of the sons, the men, and describes what the war does to them. – David Grossman, novelist and peace activist, mirrors the big questions in the little experiences of daily life. In each of these moments he shows how inextricably the lives of his characters are bound to politics. Paradoxically, it is the force and the fragility, the vulnerability and the openness of his language, his special way of telling stories, that actually make the war palpable in its full reality.
Dušan David Pařízek has previously adapted Grossman’s novel »A Horse Walks Into a Bar« for the Salzburger Festspiele (German-language premiere). The highly acclaimed production has travelled widely since then.
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