DAVID TWERSKY
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bergs of political solutions, myth and guilt, choosing to skate on the
thin
cover
ofexperience. Grossman records the voices, images, and impressions flowing
beneath the ice.
The Arabs do not emerge unscathed as "suffering victims." The occu–
pation does not lose its multi-dimensional (national security) character. And
overall, the Israel of
The Yellow Wind
does not resemble a refuge for the
tired, poor, hungry survivors from Europe yearning to breathe freely. Still,
those former refugees from Europe and the Middle East and their children
(like Grossman) are breathing freely - enough (to judge by this book) to
confront the harsh realities imposed on them by Arab hostility and its brutal
stepchild, the occupation.
Like Amos Oz's political travelogue,
In the Land of Israel,
which origi–
nally appeared in weekly installments as essays in the Labor paper
Davar,
Grossman's book has brought to the forefront of consciousness what rhetoric
had bludgeoned into an unconscious forgetfulness. Reacting to
The Yellow
Wind,
the author A.B. Yehoshua said: "The bigger and more rotten the
problems (with the occupation) the more effective the filters" which shield
Israeli Jews from confronting them. Grossman's book, Yehoshua went on,
"shook up the filters." Thus it must be read in the context of political novels
which have helped galvanize a society by expressing in language, the alpha–
bet of imagination, what was already known but not acknowledged.
Grossman's account reads like a travel notebook, with none of the hy–
perbole of the polemics which dominate the Jewish-Arab discourse. The book
carries a heavy dose of intellectual and moral authority precisely because of
(and in inverse proportion to) the quiet, understated eloquence of its prose.
One cannot help but wonder whether this reflects merely a literary conceit;
after all, Grossman's notebook reads like a piece in an Israeli version of
The
New Yorker,
but the West Bank is hardly 6,000 miles away from his home in
Jerusalem. And a novelist-cum-journalist like Grossman, who came of age
together with the 1967 war and the acquisition of the territories, can hardly
pose as an ingenue, a tourist unfamiliar with the details he describes.
This is not pretension on Grossman's part. The book has more impact
because it allows its principal intended audience - Israeli Jews jaded by re–
ports of the occupation - to let down their defenses before reconfronting a
reality made all the more agonizing by the apparent absence of solutions.
He cites a study of the dreams ofArab and Jewish children - almost all
ofwhom have dreamed about "conflict" - concluding that "among us, even
dreams are crushed under the weight of reality." The dreams "offer neither
escape nor relief' - and neither does
The Yellow Wind.
Grossman resists the
temptation to serve up rehashed theoretical solutions. But
if
the situation is so
bad, so dehumanizing for both Arabs and Jews, how can we be satisfied with
Grossman's penultimate appeal for a "passage from speech to moral action?"
Israeli discourse is heavy with solutions, a problem in itself. Grossman states
