Ryszard Kapuscinski and David Grossman

If I had to say one theme emerging from this year's PEN World Voices, it would be loss-- but even more, how to heal.  The tribute at the New York Public Library to Ryszard Kapuscinski, the author of The Emporer (1978, about Haile Salassi), Shah of Shahs (1981), and Travels with Herodotus (2005), offered this method du choix: to remember this fearless Polish journalist who died in January, down a copious amount of vodka. To heed the words of those who knew him, the speakers: Salman Rushdie, Carolin Emcke, Breyten Breytenbach, Philip Gourevitch, Laurence Weschler repeated-and also demonstrated-- his theory: You were obliged to finish a bottle once opened, or else you could be KGB. There was no agent in this group--then again, they did not share with the audience.
     Having only first met David Grossman at last year's PEN gathering, I have no idea how he likes his vodka let alone how much he drinks. Holding himself with grace, he clearly has a different method of healing in mind. In conversation with Nadine Gordimer at Cooper Union, the Israeli novelist spoke about his usual preoccupation with the political situation in his home country: the difficulties of living in a war zone, the psychic toll of that, the ethics regarding raising one's children in the ethnically volatile area separating Jews from Palestinians and by association the rest of the Arab world. There was however an unacknowledged elephant in the room. To backtrack, Grossman has written several non-fiction books dealing with these issues. On a personal level, a parent, conflicted as he is about the nature of war, he also felt the necessity, as a citizen of Israel, to obey the rules on the military. Every young Israeli citizen must serve. As reported last July in the New York Times Magazine by the French writer Bernard-Henri Levi who had visited him, Grossman, an anti war advocate nevertheless feared a new phenomenon: draft dodgers. Later that summer, in the Israeli-Lebanese conflict after the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, his son Uri was killed in combat. With nary a mention of this personal cataclysmic event, Grossman proclaimed the luck of writers. In difficult times, they can write.                                                               

                                                                                          Regina Weinreich