Hold on to the Sun

by Michal Govrin

  JM: So in Paris you began to understand the historical immediacy and continuing trauma of the Occupation and the Holocaust. I suppose, like me, you were shocked to learn about the number of deportations, some 75,000 French Jews—all that history that the French themselves were just starting to deal with.

  MG: We never spoke about it in Israel. France was “the seat of the Resistance.” We were still very much under the Gaullist myth. But let me place my stories and my first essay against the background of Israeli culture. In Israel, I was a kind of wunderkind, I could have started directing in professional theater before I went to Paris. I was in the right milieu, even for a political career, but I just felt I needed a break. I went to France, with a vague idea of writing about theater and metaphysics. I went in the fall of 72. Nobody could know that the next year would be the Yom Kippur War. We were still in the euphoria of the Six Day War. I recall an image from the last Independence Day before I left for Paris. In Tel Aviv, I saw an army jeep rushing through the city with a flag on top. That image of a military jeep in Tel Aviv, this patriotic image, scared me. I felt it was time to move away, time to go beyond the story in which I’d been raised.

  So going to Paris was an opening on many levels. I was breaking away from the expectations and the dominant narrative to look for other things that were hushed up in Israel—the metaphysical, mystical, or religious dimensions of life. At that time I called them “ethical values,” and felt that they were hidden under a nationalistic, very hedonistic, materialistic, and atheist mindset. So much happened in that year of arriving in Paris . . . I was looking for something I didn’t yet dare name: the Holocaust, the Shoah, which was my mother’s story. And, then, the shtetl, what Judaism was before Zionism. Those erased communities and along with them centuries of Jewish life and great achievements in the Diaspora which were seen by Israeli culture a little bit like jokes, or like fictions by Sholem Aleichem. There was no consciousness that all these places had existed such a short time before. And at that time I saw, really saw, for the first time diaspora Jews who lived elsewhere and were not sinners—as they were made to seem by Zionism—sinners because they hadn’t left everything on the spot and gone to Israel. This was an inconceivable thing in Israeli sensitivity, because by the fact that they’d stayed in the Diaspora, they’d seemed to put our own existence in question.

  JM:You were also coming from a totally different landscape, from the liberated Mediterranean, with its own form of Eros, a secular Sabra, raised in Tel Aviv, with very modern parents. And a resolute determination to be part of the world’s modernity.

  MG: Yes. And to be cultured. I was eager to absorb art, theater, opera. Yet, with the discovery of European culture many things were hovering, which took me time to recognize. Questions of consciousness and responsibility, and centrally among them was the story of the Holocaust, the question of how it had happened, what had prepared it within this civilization. I see now that I was also coping with my own frightful negation. This has been an ongoing process. But it did start then.

  JM: This might be a difficult thing for young readers to grasp because the Shoah, the Holocaust, is anchored in our consciousness now. But it’s certainly true that in the early 70s, it wasn’t particularly anchored in anybody’s consciousness or, rather, people were not talking about it.

  MG: Indeed. I think, in fact, that there was an awareness of it in the United States earlier than in Israel. In Israel, the negation went on even longer, hidden under official “commemorations,” which were really moments of lip service. But now that the Holocaust is everywhere, there is also a danger of talking too much.

  JM: Of making it banal?

  MG: Some of the modes of commemoration just reiterate a sadistic urge and draw on the same fascination with violence. They totally ignore what was the real experience, and I mean not only the suffering, but also the facing, the coping with evil inside the ghettoes and the camps, those examples of rare humanity inside the horror. This is an experience that can nourish us, because people still face catastrophes. They still face harsh moral decisions in extreme situations. And if we don’t draw lessons from how people cope with them, if we only tell the story of the violence or the suffering, we miss an invaluable lesson about humanity.

  JM: I’m thinking about where the Holocaust lives in your stories, especially in “La Promenade.” In it we see how survivors filter their experience. So while it’s not a story about horror, it’s a story about how one lives through horror. We see a kind of heroic survival technique and a yearning for something more—or in the case of one of the characters, a frenzy which keeps him from having to look very deeply. Perhaps part of your mother’s story, how she coped or did not cope, and what you saw in her life, had an impact on how you saw those characters and how you wrote that story.

  MG: It did. But the story actually came to me in France on two different occasions when I went to seaside towns on the Atlantic Ocean. The first was during my studies, when a bus full of German war veterans filled the streets. This impression was combined with another one I had when I came back to Paris from Israel in the late 1970s and went away for a weekend to Deauville. I remember walking on the promenade by the ocean, and from far away seeing this group of people. They were immediately recognizable—from the way they walked to the way the women held their purses to their hand gestures. It was clear they were not speaking French.

  JM: So you saw them as Eastern European Jews, probably Israelis?

  MG: Eastern Europeans, not necessarily Israelis. But I felt as though I’d zoomed in to my childhood. And I must confess here that, as I write in the essay “Journey to Poland,” going to my Polish Aunt Tonka’s was very exotic for me and quite frightening. As a child, I was afraid of the Holocaust survivors that my mother met up with in Tel Aviv. My mode of coping was by being very naughty. Something in these people must have touched me, maybe the tragedy, maybe the pain. My rejection made me cruel! Writing the story obliged me to identify with them, to see from within how such people are sealed away from reality, to listen closely to the way they do and don’t express themselves because there was always that silence—to see how memory comes, leaps out constantly, as with the character Lusia, who’s not at all my mother. My mother was a very powerful woman.

  JM:Yes, your mother was tough.

  MG: But at the same time she could subtly change, fall into these reveries. And her face would change completely. As a child, I think I detected those moments because they were the only ones where I really met her, and not just the façade. It was an existential need for me. In that sense maybe Lusia is the incarnation of my mother’s inner self, which most of the time she kept under control.

  JM: Maybe this inner self was more crucial to her having been able to survive the camps than being the “tough cookie” she presented to the world.

  MG: Absolutely. A great Israeli historian, Jacob L. Talmon, talked to me about survivors when I was directing the J-P Grumberg play about postwar France, TheWorkshop. He said that for many of them if they spoke too much, they wouldn’t be able to survive. Not speaking was a way of going on with life.The noisy character in “La Promenade,” Hirshel Feingold, is like those Jews wounded by the war who can’t stop talking, because the moment they stop all the other voices come back. So Hirshel rushes on, he’s successful in business, but he’s a kind of mechanized monster—and a victim as well.

  JM: In my reading of “La Promenade,” I think that Hirshel is the most tragic figure. He’s a grotesque clown, a hypercapitalist whom one can’t like. But he also sets himself up to be destroyed by his daughter to whom he can only give things.

  MG: I know all these characters intimately from my childhood.They haunted me also throughout the writing of my novel, The Name. The central character, Amalia, is terribly frightened of them.They embody the unbearable memory from which she keeps running away. But in the end she can see and admit the greatness of what human beings can be beyond their brokenness—even the divinity revealed by the broken soul. Samu
el Beckett also helped me understand this.

  JM: How so?

  MG: The Deauville vision happened right after I finished adapting and directing in Jerusalem a world premier of an early novel of Beckett’s, Mercier and Camier. The characters resemble Gogo and Didi from Waiting for Godot, but instead of just sitting and waiting, they walk without arriving. In my adaptation for the theater, I left the narrator on stage and he followed them on a bicycle. They didn’t see him; he saw them. That was a way of placing on stage the presence of several levels of narration.

  JM: Which also means many levels of seeing . . .

  MG: That enable pathos and empathy beyond the comical and the grotesque. You remember I had to get special permission from Beckett to do this adaptation.

  JM: I also remember the description of your meeting with him once you had already directed the play, when you came back to Paris for a visit.

  MG: He summoned me, and we had this very long, very moving conversation. He looked closely at the photographs of my show, and while bringing back to mind this early novel he started telling a childhood memory of his strolling with his father in a landscape that inspired the desolate site where the novel ends. I understood then how much Beckett’s writing was based on real experience, despite the unreal settings. And then, when I spoke of his own directing of Waiting for Godot, he started sketching on a cigarette package the actors’ movements on stage.This gave me a rare key to his esthetic and its link to marionette theater. Soon after that, I started writing “La Promenade.” The technique of having the narrator speak about the sea as an objective correlative, as Eliot would say, as a way of communicating what goes unsaid inside the characters, was my way of dealing delicately with brokenness, a way of not being too graphic or emotional.

  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?

  On style, influences, and technique . . .

  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.