David Grossman’s Writing of Bereavement

Abstract

Following his son’s death in the last hours of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, David Grossman immersed himself in completing a novel he started writing three years earlier. Published in 2008, To the End of the Land spans nearly four decades, from the Six-Day War to the eve of a military operation in the West Bank in the early 2000s. Its main protagonist, Ora, flees her Jerusalem home hoping that her absence would forestall the news that her son had died in combat. The novel, which focuses on a mother’s anxiety from a potentially imminent event, was widely celebrated as capturing the essence of the Israeli experience. However, in his following book, Falling Out of Time, which appeared in 2011, Grossman engages in a radical rewrite of his previous book. Falling Out of Time abandons the realist mode that characterizes To the End of the Land. More importantly, it describes bereavement not as a future possibility but as a catastrophe that has already befallen the characters, all of whom are parents who have lost their children. By creating a community of bereaved parents who never overcome the loss, Grossman undermines the logic of sacrifice featured in To the End of the Land, describing instead an exclusive community whose members are deeply cognizant of the ineffability of their mourning.