Hold on to the Sun

by Michal Govrin

  JM: In order to have the necessary tension and excitement for a viable short story, you create very vibrant characters. They may have moments where they dim, but they are really very alive, awash in desire.

  MG: Something that runs through all my stories is a longing, conscious or unconscious, for those brief revelations of daily life. These are the blessed moments, which can occur outside of any religion or organized belief. They are moments of intense life, of intense memory, pain, yearning, moments of sudden epiphany. They have fascinated me always and they echo closely Hasidic theology, which has a pantheistic thrust.You can find God in a blade of grass. It echoes also that quote from Nicolas Malebranche speaking about Kafka that was quoted by Walter Benjamin and finally by Paul Celan: “Attention is the silent prayer of the soul.”

  JM: But at the same time that there’s this great attention and this constant revelation of surrounding life, there’s also in all your stories a sense of movement.The characters, but also the landscapes, are almost never still, even when they try to be so. They sway, they teeter, they totter—and you know the difficulties we had trying to find the right verbs in English for the verbs in Hebrew that communicate all these motions. But the movement that grabs me in your stories is the inner turmoil, the inability to rest, the electric quality of nature and human beings constantly striving, transforming, never at peace.

  MG: “La Promenade”—its ironic title drawn from the name of the fictional café—has that connotation of movement to it, of people who keep on keeping on, who go on being those who are placeless or have been . . .

  JM: Exiled. Aren’t we back to the notion of the wanderer?

  MG: Of the wanderer. Of the exiled. I think that’s something I wasn’t consciously aware of. That’s part of the unconscious level of writing. But I think now that it’s also part of my exiting from a certain Israeli culture that pretended: “We’ve finally arrived. We’re at The Place.” By uprooting my characters from this certainty of place, they begin to long to be part of a landscape.

  JM: And they long for different stories, but also for a place of plenitude and peace.

  MG: I think that is what I sensed and sense even today about Israeli culture, that (to paraphrase a metaphor of the great poet Yehuda Amichai) the liquid is still shaking in the vessels, vessels which had been uprooted and re-rooted but were still shaking, still being formed.

  JM:This also goes back to writing through the body, and wanting to make fictional bodies resonate and reverberate in the minds and the bodies of the readers. Because you are also a very physical writer.Your characters are walking, or they’re riding bikes; they’re traveling in a plane; they’re dancing, or they’re capering foolishly.

  MG: Experiencing through the body is something very central for me. I don’t know if it has to do with being a woman writer. But I feel the need to locate the mind in a way that the body not only expresses it, but even foresees it—as if when you do something it has already been enacted unconsciously in parts of your being that are considered less “intelligent.”You’ve experienced the rush of the blood, the perspiration, the heart pangs, and then the thought comes out. Zooming into this dark zone for a fraction of a second always attracted me as revelatory of the impulses that set in motion how we act and how we react.

  JM: Your experience as a theater person, and your appreciation of the stories you physically performed at the Lecoq school when you were in Paris have no doubt reinforced this centrality of the body. In theater, for an actor to put forth the truth of a human being, it has to be through the body.

  MG: True. And just like not starting a rehearsal without a physical warm-up, I won’t start a morning of writing without warming up, because I know I write from the body as well. And from theater I know that personal expression comes mainly from body movement, body language, and not from what you say.

  JM: Can we talk about the place of the uncanny in your work? While we’ve arranged your stories according to their degree of departure from the conventions of realism, there are obvious portents and magical signs in even some of the more realistic portraits. In “Elijah’s Sabbath Days,” for example, there are dreamscapes that tell us other truths, contradictory, troubling truths. I’m wondering to what extent these different levels of possibility, these ways of making animate what is normally inanimate, are projections against the incursion of death, which is, of course, how Freud postulates the uncanny.

  MG: I don’t think I’ve experienced these stories as facing death. I would even say I don’t feel I’ve dared touch this subject in my writing in a direct way until very recently. Maybe rather than death and the uncanny, there is in my stories a realm of being that’s different from what is usually connoted as “being.” The character Berenov and the people of the island in “Rites of Spring” experience death as a mystical moment of bliss. Maybe that’s a way of running away from death . . .

  JM: Or maybe it’s a different way of understanding death.

  MG: Or aspiring to something else. I think what you call “uncanny” was my way of dealing with the beyond.With what is beyond material reality.

  JM: Perhaps the uncanny is the wrong term. But there is a fantastical weirdness in your character Berenov turning into a tree, for example, in his becoming living vegetation.

  MG: That was, I suspect, my way of coping with old age. I wrote that when my father started to grow old. I think I was working through the decaying of the body, and the freedom of the emotions, of the soul, in a decaying body. Berenov permits himself to succumb to something that was always there, like a call—and he blooms in a certain way. A sudden bloom because he gives in to an inner urge that he’d been repressing all those years. In Hasidic thought there is this moment of ecstasy when the soul leaves the body to cleave with that which is beyond it. It can occur in the moment you say, “Hear, Oh Israel.” I was very much immersed at the time of writing “Rites of Spring” in that way of Hassidic thinking. I could see these moments of disappearance as a reversal into something extremely positive. Let me tell you the anecdote of sending “Rites of Spring” from Paris to Tel Aviv. I was terrified by how my parents were going to read it, and what they were going to think about their daughter, whom they had sent to do her PhD in Paris, sending them back this strange story about a man who gropes about in the toilet and . . .

  JM: And reaches for the key that he’s lost down the drain and ends up with a handful of shit.

  MG:Yes. So what were they going to think about me? To my amazement and gratitude, I got back a typed text from my father—because a handwritten manuscript wouldn’t have been good enough. He actually sent me the first review I ever had—and in it he interprets that moment of Berenov touching the shit in a traditional Hasidic way.

  JM: He was raised in a Hasidic environment? I only knew how much of an active Socialist and even a secularist he was.

  MG: There’s a direct line from the Hasidic legacy to the Zionist pioneers. This is still largely ignored by the official narrative, and I discovered it vividly while working on my father’s and grandfather’s memoirs. Our family was unusual, as four generations arrived in the 20s, from the pious greatgrandfather to the socialist secular grandsons. There wasn’t a break between the generations. They shared the same Zionist dream even if articulated in different forms. I have memories of my father dancing Hasidic dances, joking in Yiddish, singing Hasidic songs with his brother who was a member of the Knesset and a minister of the Labor Party. My father embodied this energy is his world vision very powerfully. So in his “review” he writes to me: “Berenov touches the manure and that’s how we know he’s alive!” And I realized that my father understood my story in a way I didn’t dare see it, as the Hasidic gesture of descending far below for the sake of rising upwards.

  On writing and politics ...

  JM: I’ve heard you worry about the overt secularism of contemporary Israeli literature. I wonder, then, if you write in part to create a balance in Israeli fiction. For, as we’ve discussed, there’s this m
ystical yearning and belief in much of what you write.

  MG: I realize now that I began to write also as a rebellious act, rebelling against the generation before me, the generation of Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, all those major realist male writers. I always felt closer to Bialik, as I’ve mentioned before, to Shmuel Yossef Agnon, to Aharon Appelfeld’s lyrical prose. In that sense I was overtly rebelling against the dominant tradition of what Israeli literature is or “should be,” in which the writer, also an intellectual, is meant to form a kind of collective ideological identity or “Israelness,” as if there were such a monolithic thing.

  JM: You’ve talked both about the necessity of mythic structures created through narrative and also about their pervasive danger.

  MG: I do think that what’s going on in the conflict in the Middle East is in large part a war between the three monotheistic narratives, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Stories can enclose one community and pit it against the other.The battles among these three religions are all mythical wars that have in them questions of exclusivity, of who is right, who is wrong. And these myths go very deep. Anti-Semitism is a good example of the damages stories can inflict. I even think we can tie misogynistic myths to anti-Semitism. Jews have often been seen as “effeminate” or even as “sinful women.” With the legacy of Zionism on one side of my family and of the Holocaust from my mother’s side—which results from a national narrative that brought Germany to a state of madness—I was always conscious both of the ideological dimension of stories and of the unstoppable process of story-making. I think that is why as a writer I turned to a “reality” that carries layers we do not see. This mythic dimension is inherent to traditional Jewish writing that always has traces of the presence (or the deplored absence) of God. Later, I understood that more than being a Jewish writer, I was and am a Jewish woman writer.

  JM: You’ve written elsewhere about the image and status of women in Jewish myth and literature and about the imbrication of global feminism and Jewish womanhood. Here is a passage from your essay, “The Jewish Literary Manifesto, First Person Feminine”: “The power of anarchy, of ‘to the contrary,’ characterizes the woman’s voice in Jewish myth. It displaces ruling authorities or fossilized truths, thereby awaking rage or mockery. Nevertheless, through the slyness of comedy, the power of passion and Eros, or the strength of remonstration, it can succeed in overturning even God’s plans. The change in women’s status in global society is generating an unprecedented revolution in the place of women in Jewish culture, in a time when Jewish history veers between the poles of destruction and renewal.” You imply some key questions and suggest some potentially stunning changes in the status of women in this passage. And yet I’ve never thought of you as a militant writer for women’s rights.

  MG: No, I’m not. In my childhood and adolescence, as I was the only child of a late second marriage, I was the tomboy. I was the strongest “guy” in the neighborhood, retrieving items that fell out of windows and into the trees for the neighbors. But as I grew older, I began to listen to all the other voices that came through my body. I now think that containing all of them is a feminine way of listening. For if a mother weren’t able to love all her children, and be able to contain their oppositions, how would we live? It’s true I never adhered to any feminist . . .

  JM: Movement. No, I know.

  MG: But I do claim in my lonely way another path. Another path to what womanhood might be: On the one hand the power of holding a total reality, as Emmanuel Levinas might put it. On the other, eclipsing myself, creating the place for all my “children,” in whatever form they take, to be what they are, to be amazed by the richness they bring back to me, a richness that the mother’s embrace enables. Being in control and creating a space where things can happen; letting others be without immediately controlling them. For me that is a feminine or a woman’s way of being, of giving life.

  On the work of translation . . .

  JM: I’d like to turn to the question of translation because for days now we’ve been reading your work aloud in English and fussing, fumbling, struggling to edit the translations and get the English just right, or as right as possible, but also to capture the multiple layers in your texts.

  MG: I’m so glad for this chance to revisit the English and to strive towards a harmonizing of the voices given to me by other translators, especially because I’m more and more confident of what I should sound like in English.

  JM: And I’m sure translators like Barbara Harshav, Dalya Bilu, and Peter Cole have helped build this confidence. But what haven’t we been able to do because of the difficulty of moving from Hebrew to English?

  MG: Hebrew is an extraordinary literary language, and with Chinese the only language that has carried history in an uninterrupted way from Antiquity to the present. Hebrew contains the Bible and the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, all the layers of the Talmud, the mystical writings of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, Enlightenment literature, modern poetry, street slang. All of them can be contained in one piece, and they can live next to each other. It’s an extraordinarily rich tool, very intertextual.

  With Hebrew, when you use a word tied to a special context in another context it immediately sets up a reverberation. A Hebrew-speaking reader will experience a kind of doubling of references. You remember that we were looking for . . .

  JM: A way in English to make proper names, such as Hila (which means “light”) from “Elijah’s Sabbath Days” or Nammi (which means “the sleeper”) from “Jet Lag” keep their second symbolic meaning. And how we searched for an English word that could mean “wind” and “spirit” as one Hebrew word does. But there wasn’t a way to capture this particular polyvalency.

  MG: And in “Hold On to the Sun” I also employed the kind of Hebrew used in early translations of American English. So there were all these layers of language we had to attack. Sometimes coming back to modern English to find the words was great and other times we had to use a King James type of English.The King James quality gives a mythic feel to some of the texts’ language—a feeling of heightened oratory. But I must say that while some things are lost in translation, I’m not less intrigued by what is gained.

  JM: And what is gained?

  MG: Translation happens in every act of reading. That’s why I see my readers as intimate collaborators. The writing lives only once it’s read, and it’s always read in a different way by whatever mind it crosses. The closest experience of knowing what’s going on in the mind of a reader is when you have to interpret your text in another language and you say overtly: “We’re translating.” You see how the piece of writing is not yours anymore. It’s again the gesture of a mother:You let the child go; you don’t possess it; you don’t own it. It’s not “yours,” and it lives another life. Language is always beyond the individual writer, the individual mind. Walter Benjamin calls it “pure language.”

  JM: I’m glad to hear this because you know there were many moments when I was quite frustrated while we revised the translations worrying about the particularities of English verbs impoverishing the ambiance created through the Hebrew.

  MG: It was a very special experience of translating and editing. You, not speaking Hebrew, had to recreate in your mind a seasoned, chiseled linguistic reality—without bumps and bizarre moments. Your experience in translating from the French, the way you’ve shared my writing, and our past collaboration in the theater were reassuring and fascinating to me. You pull the translation totally into an English landscape, knowing that my writing comes from somewhere else and wanting that somewhere else to be acknowledged.

  JM: Yes. I don’t think what we’ve done is to evacuate the Hebrew and make the stories so colloquially American or so specifically American that they couldn’t be coming from another culture or another language. That possible otherness is easier to find with your stories because they do have a legendary aspect; they are highly stylized and one can’t really flatten them. But my biggest anxiety, as it would have been for anyone who tran
slates literature, was how to capture the degree of “particularness” and of exploration in your original language.You push and pull Hebrew to make it do things that other writers don’t do. I worried about finding similar ways of pushing English without making it sound overly precious.

  MG: I think some of the moments of collaboration were like writing together, because we were experimenting with the possible order of words, how to enter a sentence so the reader experiences what the character experiences at the same time. I really appreciated the fierceness of our linguistic debates.

  On exile, the limits of framing, eroticism, and allegory . . .

  JM: Why does the Pythia, that golem-like avenger, turn up in your writing?

  MG: “The End of the Pythia” came upon me while I was trying to observe the Sabbath in Paris while living in that garret on the Rue de Rivoli, on the most crowded shopping day on a street known for its shops. I remember once needing to buy a can opener. I went through all these alleys of things in the basement of the biggest department store in Paris. I was in this temple of cutlery; there were hundreds of kinds of can openers. I began to tremble, seeing how much you can have and how little you need, seeing the homeless, seeing Europe and the power of culture, and was shocked feeling that despite this refinement many horrors happened there, and nothing stopped while they went on. The story begins with a nod to Bialik’s prose poem, “The Scroll of Fire,” which is about the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Divine Presence from its ruins. The cadence of Bialik’s sentences launches the “Pythia,” a legend about destruction and exile and the world in chaos.

  JM: There’s also a supermarket aspect to this world, a story of life as consumerism.

  MG: Life as piles. Piles of suitcases, piles of purses, piles of glasses, just like at Auschwitz, as I later understood.

  JM: What an image! Speaking of images—by dint of what they do, some of your characters function as framing eyes—the photographer in “Hold On to the Sun,” for instance. These characters catch reality through long descriptions.