Free Writing in the Dark by David Grossman

I, who had grown up within the silence and fragmented whispers that had filled me with so many fears and nightmares, who had written a book about a boy who almost loses his mind because of his parents’ silence, suddenly understood my parents and my friends’ parents who chose to be mute.
    I felt that if I told him, if I even so much as cautiously alluded to what had happened over there , something in the purity of my three-year-old son would be polluted; that from the moment such possibilities of cruelty were formulated in his childlike, innocent consciousness, he would never again be the same child.
    He would no longer be a child at all.

    When I published See Under: Love in Israel, some critics wrote that I belonged to the “second generation” and that I was the son of “Holocaust survivors.” I am not. My father immigrated to Palestine from Poland as a child, in 1936. My mother was born in Palestine, before the State of Israel was established.
    And yet I am. I am the son of “Holocaust survivors” because in my home too, as in so many Israeli homes, a thread of deep anxiety was stretched out, and with almost every move you made, you touched it. Even if you were very careful, even if you hardly made any unnecessary movements, you still felt that constant quiver of a profound lack of confidence in the possibility of existence. A suspicion toward man and what might erupt from him at any moment.
    In our home too, at every celebration, with every purchase of a new piece of furniture, every time a new child was born in the neighborhood, there was a feeling that each such event was one more word, one more sentence, in the intensely conducted dialogue with over there. That every presence echoed an absence, and that life, the simplest of daily routines, the most trivial oscillations—“Should the child be allowed to go on the school trip?” or “Is it worth renovating the apartment?”—somehow echoed what happened over there : all those things that managed to survive the there , and all those that did not; and the life lessons, the acute knowledge that had been burned in our memory.
    This became all the more pertinent when greater
decisions were at stake: Which profession should we choose? Should we vote right-wing or left-wing? Marry or stay single? Have another child, or is one enough? Should we even bring a child into this world? All these decisions and acts, small and large, amounted to a huge, practically superhuman effort to weave the thin fabric of everydayness over the horrors beneath. An effort to convince ourselves that despite everything we know, despite everything engraved on our bodies and souls, we have the capacity to live on, and to keep choosing life and human existence.
    Because for people like myself, born in Israel in the years after the Holocaust, the primary feeling—about which we could not talk at all, and for which we may not have had the words at the time—was that for us, for Jews, death was the immediate interlocutor. That life, even when it was full of the energies and hopes and fruitfulness of a newly revived young country, still involved an enormous and constant effort to escape the dread of death.
    You may say, with good reason, that this is in fact the basic human condition. Certainly it is so, but for us it had daily and pressing reminders, open wounds and fresh scars, and representatives who were living and tangible, their bodies and souls crushed.
    In Israel of the 1950s and ’60s, and not only during times of extreme despair but precisely at those moments when the great commotion of “nation-building” waned, in the moments when we tired a little, just for an instant,
of being a miracle of renewal and re-creation, in those moments of the twilight of the soul, both private and national, we could immediately feel, in the most intimate way, the band of frost that suddenly tightens around our hearts and says quietly but firmly: How quickly life fades. How fragile it all is. The