Skin & Fear

Yair’s vow and the novel‘s title are taken from a line Kafka wrote to a lover, “Love is that you are my knife with which I dig deeply into myself.” And they dig -- into each other and into themselves. Just one thing happens in this book: Two people fall in love. They torment each other with pleasures offered and withheld, and, through their torments and their joy, learn to see themselves anew. They strive to cut through, as Yair puts it, “all the adult epidermis that has scabbed over us throughout life.”

Skin is an important theme for Grossman -- scabs and nakedness. At one point in Be My Knife, an angry Miriam returns one of Yair’s letters unopened. Yair, mad with despair, drives to her house. He sits in his car and removes his clothes, “one piece after the other, and the shoes and socks, and then I was already a different person. It happened to me in the space of a few seconds, such a border to cross -- one minute you‘re dressed and in the next: flesh, animal, less than an animal, as if the skin had peeled off you with the clothes, the epidermis, and the entire pile of skin underneath it.”

There is a section in The Book of Intimate Grammar in which a lonely neighbor hires the child protagonist’s father to knock down a wall in her apartment. At first she is amused by the spectacle: a coarse, brutish man showing off for her, regaining his youth with every blow of the hammer. She pays him to knock down another wall, then another, and before long she‘s sold all that she owns to keep him near her, hammering away, tearing down every wall that she, now a shivering wreck, has left. This is the sort of love that Grossman proposes for Yair and Miriam, a passion that approaches suicide, but is, at the same time, their only hope. Yair wishes he could stand before Miriam, entirely transformed: “new, free, naked. Even for just one day. Even for one page of a letter. One blink of absolute freedom? Why not? Really? Otherwise, what am I worth?”

Grossman lifts his coffee cup to his mouth with both hands, almost prayerfully. “There is a very strong tendency,” he says, “to interpret every book from Israel, and from me or Amos Oz or A.B. Yehoshua, as a political declaration. It is not.” It’s not so easy, though, to separate politics and literature: When asked about the situation in Israel, Grossman invariably ends up speaking about literature, and when asked about his writing, he ends up talking politics. “I try to keep it separate right now,” he says. “The situation is very extreme, extremely extreme, so to say, and of course there is a lot of temptation to write about it, but right now I feel I want to purify literature, my literature at least, from the poisons of this reality. I want to write about the things that are more important -- relationship nuances, love, parents and children, families -- because I am afraid that if we put all our energy in the shield of our identity, we shall wind up like the armored a suit but without the person inside, and I want to write about the person.”

It is of course profoundly political for an Israeli in the 18th month of the current Intifada to insist, in literature or without, on vulnerability; to publicly decry the soul-shrinking consequences of constant aggression and constant defensiveness. And it is unavoidably political -- in the midst of constant bloodshed, as a citizen of a nation that fears destruction from all sides, as one of a people upon whom unimaginable destruction has been wreaked -- to write a novel suggesting that the greatest, most courageous achievement you can hope for is the almost unthinkable task of laying yourself out before another -- even if only from the safety of a P.O. box, naked and bleeding and flayed -- and to ask that other to be your knife, to cut you deeper still.

One of the deadliest symptoms of the scabbing, the congealing that Grossman describes, is an inability to step outside the brittle confines of the self, to imagine oneself in a lover‘s body or in the body of one who hates you. In The Yellow Wind, Grossman’s 1987 book about the toll Israel‘s occupation of the West Bank takes on Palestinians and Jews alike, he records a meeting with a group of Jewish settlers. He asks them to put aside issues of right and wrong for just a moment, and to try to “imagine themselves in their [Arab] neighbors’ places and tell me what seems to them to be the most hateful manifestation of the occupation.” They answer that the situation is not their fault, and Grossman says that may be true, but that‘s not the question. They answer that they haven’t taken anyone‘s land. Maybe not, Grossman says, and reminds them that’s not the question. They say that they did not start the war, and again Grossman asks them to imagine themselves as Arabs. Finally, one man answers that he cannot and will not consider the Palestinians‘ perspective even for a moment, “because he is caught up in a struggle with them, at war, he said, and were he to allow himself to pity, to identify, he would weaken and endanger himself.”