In the beginning there were some impassioned souls who lifted up their eyes to the reform of the world. The blazing faith of religious men, the sons and grandsons of religious men, generations upon generations of passion and persistence. These sons had lost their religious faith and abandoned the religious commandments, but they had not given up their devotion and drive and their thirst for the absolute: to be attached to a single, great, final and decisive truth, that found detailed expression in innumerable rules and regulations, both great and small, in everyday life. They had ceased to be religious according to the religious law, but in a new way they continued to be pious and even messianic. And when they came to the Land of Israel and set up the first kibbutzim, their ideals were like a fire in their bones.

They found a hard and alien land, very remote from the ‘land our fathers loved’ portrayed in sentimental songs, the opposite of the ‘land of eternal springtime’ of which Bialik's bird sang, a parched contrast with the fairytale land they had imagined from the stories of their childhood in the snow-bound shtetl, that land of sunshine, of almonds and raisins, of the seven biblical species, the land of Mapu's ‘Love of Zion’ and the verses of the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) movement, of the olivewood camels of the Bezalel Art School and the pictures of the Jewish National Fund.

They came to a bare and baring land, where the harsh climate and the grinding toil and the loneliness of the whispering nights stripped a man naked of every possible disguise.

Do not expect me to reveal all sorts of creative secrets, or to work alchemy, or take you on a guided tour of the kitchen, or whatever. On the contrary. My aim here is to express some very simple thoughts about one or two things to do with contemporary Israeli writing.

On the threshold

You've guessed: having said ‘contemporary Israeli’ I am actually going to lead off with totally other places and times. I believe the greatest creations in world literature have almost always been achieved in twilight periods. This is a rather curious phenomenon, that may be out of line with every social or national ideology. All ideologies like to boast that the arts flourish under their aegis. No ideology can be pleased to acknowledge that it is its decline and fall that favours the growth of literature. It is nevertheless true that, in the lives of nations, faiths and cultures, periods of flourishing success, of dynamic creativity, periods when things are getting bigger and stronger, are not propitious to storytellers. (They themselves may well be drawn into such an embrace, but their stories will wend their way to other times and places.) The greatest creations in world literature have generally been produced in the twilight, or in relation to a period of twilight, when a centuries-old civilisation has passed its zenith and is on the decline, whether under external pressure or under its own weight when an ageing culture is beginning to smell of decay.

The authors of some of the best works of world literature are people who have had divided minds in their own time.

I was born in Jerusalem; I lived there as a child; when I was nine I went through the siege and the shelling of Jerusalem. That was the first time I saw a corpse. A shell fired from the Arab Legion's gun battery on Nebi Samwil hit a pious Jew and ripped his stomach open. I saw him lying there in the street. He was a short man with a straggly beard. His face as he lay there dying looked pale and surprised. It happened in July 1948. I hated that man for a long time because he used to come back and scare me in my dreams. I knew that Jerusalem was surrounded by forces that wanted me dead.

Later I moved away from Jerusalem. I still love the city as one loves a disdainful woman. Sometimes, when I had nothing better to do, I used to go to Jerusalem to woo her. There are some lanes and alleys there that know me well, even if they pretend not to.

I liked Jerusalem because it was a city at the end of the road, a city you could get to but never go through; and also because Jerusalem was never really part of the State of Israel: with the exception of a few streets, it always maintained a separate identity, as though it was deliberately turning its back on all those flat white commercial towns: Tel Aviv, Holon, Herzlia, Netanya.

Jerusalem was different. It was the negation of the regular whitewashed blocks of flats, far from the plains of citrus groves, the gardens with their hedges, the red roofs and irrigation pipes sparkling in the sun.

No, I do not believe there is any such thing as a ‘kibbutz literature’. There are poems and books that have a kibbutz setting, and there are poets and writers who live in a kibbutz, but the kibbutz has not inspired any ‘mutation’ of Hebrew literature.

For myself, I am better off, for various reasons, living in a kibbutz than I could be elsewhere, even if kibbutz life exacts its price from me.

If I lived in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, it is very doubtful whether I would manage to elude the grip of the ‘literary world’, in which writers and academics and critics and poets sit around discussing each other.

Not that this phenomenon is without a certain attraction, it is just that life (as they say) is too short, and if you shut yourself away in ‘literary circles’ you miss something.

People sometimes ask me, both here in Israel and abroad, if Hulda isn't too small for me, and so on. They quiz me about parochial atmosphere, etcetera. They wonder how I cope with wanderlust and the urge for adventure that they imagine writers feel more keenly than other people. But the urge does not necessarily put on its travelling clothes; it can be satisfied by local gossip, by peering obliquely at the lives of different people.

Here I know a very large number of people, about three hundred. I know them at close range, in the way that you can know someone after twenty years in the same place. I can see genetics at work: fathers and sons, uncles and cousins, combinations of chromosomes and the vagaries of fate.

One day in London, in the thick of a smog, when you could not see your hand in front of your face, a man was summoned by phone to a hospital at the other end of town where his child was seriously ill. The man opened his front door and stood in the murky darkness, calling out for help, but there were no cars, no passers-by. Suddenly a hand landed on his shoulder and a voice said, ‘I'll take you.’ And the stranger did indeed lead the anxious father right across London, unfalteringly, saying confidently from time to time ‘turn left here’, ‘mind the steps’, ‘careful, there's a ramp’. When they reached the hospital the man asked the stranger how he could possibly find his way through such a dense fog. ‘Darkness and fog do not bother me,’ the other replied, ‘because I am blind.’

The connection between the world of events and the world of words in books is so subtle as to defy definition, and that is why I try to approach it through parables. A writer sometimes has dual loyalties, and sometimes he has to operate like an undercover agent. He is a more-or-less respectable citizen of the kingdom of events, conscientious and law-abiding, paying his taxes and expressing opinions, doing occasional good deeds and so forth. And yet his mind is on the words that could be used to talk about the events, rather than on the events themselves.

The two kingdoms are governed by different and even conflicting laws. In the kingdom of events one is supposed to prefer good to evil, the helpful to the harmful.

Yes, there is a growing despondency, and lately people have stopped feeling ashamed of it and hiding it behind the usual mask of cheerful complacency. I myself share this despondency. I even felt it in the years between 1967 and 1973, when most people seemed to be living in a state of uninterrupted euphoria. But recently, specifically since the Yom Kippur War, I have had an intuitive feeling that deep down at least some of the pain is a symptom of recovery. I am less frightened now than I was, let us say, in 1969 or 1970.

Look, for the past three years, since the Yom Kippur War, this peculiar people has been tormenting itself with the question ‘What did we do wrong?’, on all sorts of levels, ranging from those who keep harping on the memory of our emergency arsenals, which were so badly neglected, to those who are preoccupied with the question of the historical, theological, symbolic, and metaphysical meaning of what happened to us. Other peoples do not keep picking at their sores so obsessively, so masochistically. Naturally, writers and thinkers and moralists of all kinds everywhere engage in soul-searching. But here everybody torments himself, with hardly an exception.

And after all, from what you could call the military point of view we were not defeated in the Yom Kippur War. On the contrary, we won a great victory. We recovered from a sudden invasion by armies not far off the total strength of the combined NATO forces, and in a few days we went from a position comparable to Dunkirk to a situation similar to that of the Allied landings in Normandy, on two separate fronts, and it is well known that our subsequent advance was halted not by exhaustion but by outside pressure.

The collection of essays Beor hatkhelet ha'aza (Under this blazing light) was first published in 1979; it has been reprinted several times. The Hebrew edition contains thirty-six essays, of which eighteen were selected by the author for this English edition. In making the English translations I have benefited from Amos Oz's cooperation.

Some months ago, when Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation recognised each other, I had a vivid recollection of the night of 14–15 May 1948, when Israel declared its independence. I was nine years old. I remember my father coming to my bed and lying beside me in the dark. ‘When I was a boy, I was beaten in school in Russia and then in Poland for being a little Jew’, he said. ‘You may still get beaten in school, but not for being a Jew. This is what the State of Israel is all about.’ In the darkness I could suddenly feel his tears. It was the only time in my life that my father cried in my presence.

The next morning, within hours of Israel's declaration of independence, five Arab armies invaded the country from all directions. The Jewish section of Jerusalem was besieged for several months, bombarded by Jordanian artillery from the east and by Egyptian forces from the south. What had been, since the beginning of the century, a neighbourly feud between Arabs and Jews turned that night into a major international war.

Twice in my life, in 1967 and again in 1973, I saw the face of war as a reservist soldier, first in Sinai and then in the Golan Heights. That experience turned me into a peace activist, but not into a pacifist ready to turn the other cheek to an enemy. If anyone tries to take my life or the life of my people, I will fight. I will fight if anyone tries to enslave us, but nothing short of the defence of life and freedom could make me take up arms.

The first films I ever saw were Tarzan films. There wasn't a single Tarzan film shown in Jerusalem that we, the gang and I, missed. We saw them all. It was when we were seven, eight, nine. … There were Flash Gordon films too, and others, all of them presenting a neat, orderly world.

I look back nostalgically on those films, on that world: it was always a simple compound of morality, beauty and strength. It is a lost paradise. Who is there who has never yearned for a simple, symmetrical world, in which the good guy is always better-looking, braver and cleverer (but not by much) than the bad guy, and where he always gets the beautiful girl in the end? All those Tarzan and Flash Gordon films were idealistic to the highest degree. To this day they still remind me of the fascinations of a neat, orderly world. By the time I had seen my third or fourth Flash Gordon I knew what one could look forward to: disorder would eventually join forces with order, and accept its rule. It was a symmetrical world, with rewards and punishments, and a reason and justification for all pain and suffering. Sometimes I could guess right at the start of a film at what point the forces of evil would erupt … but even the sudden, unexpected explosions of evil were amazingly well integrated into what was expected and right. We knew that Tarzan would be captured by the savages. We knew that they would overpower him and tie him up and his situation would be desperate, with no hope of escape.

I can talk about Berdyczewski the way one talks about a distant relation, ‘distant’ in the sense of an uncle whom I never met because he died eighteen years before I was born. I read his stories with curiosity, respect and awe, and as I read a kind of ‘genetic’ pulse within me bears witness to the distant relationship. (Incidentally, ‘distant relation’ is Berdyczewski's own expression: he employed it to sign many of his essays.)

Berdyczewski as a writer was distant, apparently at least, from the mainstream of Hebrew literature in his day. He did not follow the beaten track. He even lived a long way from the centres, the ‘capital cities’ of Hebrew letters in his generation. He did not live in Odessa or Warsaw, he did not even come to Palestine, he drifted to Berlin and Breslau, where Hebrew writing was an even more solitary business than elsewhere. He communicated with other writers, with editors and publishers, mainly by letter. His letters are often bitter and anguished.

But Berdyczewski was not a solitary writer in the geographical sense alone. All over Europe the great novelists were busy exposing the depths of the human psyche. All the various schools of Hebrew writers too were discovering the complexities of psychology, of the individuals, types, societies. Berdyczewski did not think much of psychology. This was considered by many to be an unpardonable sin: how can there be such a thing as a writer who does not take the trouble to endow his characters with ‘depth’ and ‘complexity’? What about their childhoods? Where are the complexes, the repressions, and so on? Is that how you portray a character, just a couple of…

Most of the essays and articles brought together in this book are ‘based on’ or ‘adapted from’ articles, interviews, lectures and radio talks dating from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. Hence some possible repetitions, and hence also the differences, of tone and style, between the various articles. It is not particularly hard to find unfinished or inconsistent lines of thought, or even some contradictions.

Perhaps most of the essays in this book are substitutes for stories that I have not managed to write.

When I sit down to write a story I already have the people. What are called the ‘characters’. Generally there is a man – or woman – at the centre, and others round about or opposite. I don't know yet what will happen to them, what they will do to each other, but they have converged on me and I am already involved in conversations, arguments, even quarrels with them. There are times when I say to them: get out of here. Leave me alone. You are not right for me and I am not right for you. It's too difficult for me. I'm not the right man. Go to somebody else.

Sometimes I persist, time passes, they lose interest, perhaps they really do go to some other writer, and I write nothing.

But sometimes they persist, like Michael's Hannah, for example: she nagged me for a long time, she wouldn't give up, she said, look, I'm here, I shan't leave you alone, either you write what I tell you or you won't have any peace.

I argued, I apologised, I said, look, I can't do it, go to someone else, go to some woman writer, I'm not a woman. I can't write you in the first person, let me be. No. She didn't give up. And then, when I did write, so as to get rid of her and get back somehow to my own life, still every day and every night she was arguing about each line.

Shortly after the October Revolution my grandfather, Alexander Klausner, a businessman and poet, fled from Odessa in southern Russia. He had always been a ‘Lover of Zion’ and was one of the first Zionists. He believed wholeheartedly that the time had come for the Jews to return to the Land of Israel, so that they could begin by becoming a normal nation like all the rest, and later perhaps an exceptional nation. Nevertheless, after leaving Odessa my grandfather did not head for Jerusalem – that Jerusalem that all his poems had yearned for (in Russian) – but settled with his wife and two sons in Vilna, which was then in Poland. In addition to his profound affection for the ancestral land, my grandfather was also a thoroughgoing European, in his bearing, his habits, his dress and his principles. He considered that conditions in the Land of Israel were as yet insufficiently European. That is why he settled in Vilna, where he once more divided his time between business and poetry. He raised his two sons in a spirit of European and Zionist idealism.

However in those days no one in Europe, apart from my grandfather and some other Jews like him, was a European: they were all either pan-Slavists, or communists, or pan-Germanists, or just plain Bulgarian nationalists. In 1933, having been taunted by his antisemitic or order-loving neighbours to ‘Go to Palestine, little Yid’, Grandfather reluctantly decided to go to ‘Asia’ with his wife and his younger son.

What is literature all about?

If one wished to give an extremely concise answer, which could serve as an entry in a short encyclopaedia, one could word it as follows:

Literature: A form of expression and communication by means of language, generally dealing with three set subjects in various contexts and combinations: 1. Sorrow or suffering. 2. Protest or complaint. 3. Consolation or semi-consolation or less, including submission. Full stop. It must also contain something new, either in the arrangement of the words and sentences, or in the arrangement of the subject-matter, or in some other way.

The following notes are intended for the reader who is not satisfied with this short description and requires further elucidation:

Sorrow: May be individual or collective, or both, interrelated, contrasted, one set against the other, etc., etc.

Protest or complaint: Either wistful, or irritable, or violent, or even rebellious.

Consolation or submission: Includes acceptance of punishment or suffering, willingness to be absorbed into the cosmic cycle, or resignation and subjugation of the will. Or reconciliation with one's fellow man or with some force or other. Or seeing the whole situation in a new light. Also includes religious illumination and the faith that lies beyond despair.

What is encompassed within this description of literature as a circle of sorrow – protest – consolation? Almost everything. Homer and Oedipus, Dante and Don Quixote, John Donne and King Lear, Andrei Bolkonski and Raskolnikov and the Three Sisters, Kafka, Hans Castorp, and those involved in trials and experiments at the present time.

Recently I have found myself reacting rather strangely to the word ‘socialism’. Whenever I meet an ardent socialist, or for that matter a keen anti-socialist, I immediately feel an urge to ask ironic questions. It would appear from this that my socialism lacks fervent enthusiasm. No doubt the reason is that I do not live in oppression or poverty, but more or less comfortably.

The origin and precondition of all socialism is sensitivity to injustice and hatred of villains. But sensitivity and hatred cannot flourish side by side. Hatred is a gut feeling, while sensitivity demands awareness, attentiveness, scepticism, a critical frame of mind, an inclination to probe and scrutinise, and, first and foremost, a sense of humour. Consequently the socialist psyche is fed at once on fire and ice. A difficult diet. A cosy, fireless socialism gradually develops into torpid liberalism. Hatred, on the other hand, breeds more hatred, and if it seizes the reins of power it discloses a fist of iron, arrogant, authoritarian, armed with formulas, slogans and shackles, hectoring and merciless.

To be a socialist means to fight for the right of individuals and societies to control their own destinies up to that point beyond which men are incorrigibly ruled by fate. It is helpful, however, not to lose sight of the fact that social injustice, political wrong and economic inequity are only one battlefield in the wider arena of human existence, and that we are hemmed in on at least three sides by our pitiful frailty, the pain of our mortality, sexual injustice and the misery of our fate.