Adam and I rarely get to the movies since the children were born, but yesterday we had the distinct pleasure of catching a movie at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival . It was the adaption of David Grossman's novel, Someone to Run With. Not having read the original novel, I relished the absence of any portentous allusions to "The Conflict" in the screen version. It was simply a story--a dark, compelling teenage fairy tale.
Coincidentally, in yesterday's New York Times, Grossman writes about the narrowing space between private and public in Israel and elsewhere. This has an added poignancy in that he buried his son Uri in last summer's second Lebanon war (you can read the eulogy here).
David Grossman writes
And I write the life of my land, Israel. The land that is tortured, frantic, drugged by an overdose of history, excessive emotions that cannot be contained by any human capacity, extreme events and tragedies, enormous anxiety and paralyzing sobriety, too much memory, failed hopes and the circumstances of a fate unique among all nations: an existence that sometimes appears to be a story of mythical proportions, a story that is “larger than life” to the point that something seems to have gone wrong with the relation it bears to life itself. A country that has become tired of the possibility of ever leading the standard, normal life of a country among countries, a nation among nations.
He writes with beauty and pain, yet is able to conclude with a nechemta, a word of consolation. Read his essay here.
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