Art is a powerful tool for new generations to understand the traumas suffered by their ancestors. This is what the Israeli writer David Grossman says, one of the main representatives of the country’s literature and author of “A Vida Brinca Muito Comigo” — a novel now released by Companhia das Letras that talks precisely about this type of intergenerational trauma.
“Trauma is something that affects not only the individual who suffers it, but also the following generations. In a way, it’s as if it were recorded in our DNA”, says the author, in a video call interview.
Grossman, now 68, points out that the Shoah — the Hebrew word used by Jews to refer to the Holocaust — remains an open wound in Israeli identity. “There is a need to understand this trauma. It continues to radiate so violently into our lives that we cannot breathe.”
At the same time, the Jerusalem-born author recalls that “we are reaching a point where there will be no more survivors of the Shoah alive to tell us exactly how the atrocities took place.” In this sense, he says, art is one of the few available means to imagine “what it was like to be in the concentration camps, what it was like to be inside the Nazi murder machine.”
For him, in addition to understanding the suffering of victims, it is also necessary to put oneself in the place of the perpetrators of violence. “How does a normal human being become a murderer? What do you have to give up to surrender to this kind of behavior?”, he asks.
The author states that the traumas of Israeli society are not restricted to the past, as the regional geopolitical context continues to produce suffering for families.
Grossman bears witness to this. He lost his son Uri, a fighter in the Israel Defense Forces, during the war against the Lebanese group Hizbullah in 2006.
On the other hand, he says he believes that his compatriots are not yet prepared to face the traumas suffered by the Palestinians.
“Many of us collaborated with the occupation [dos territórios palestinos]this system of oppression,” says Grossman. He also served in the Israeli army — military enlistment is mandatory in the country.
Currently, Grossman is critical of the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories occupied by Israel since 1967. In an Army Radio interview in December, he described Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories as “apartheid.”
“It’s hard to expect one side to be so generous as to allow the enemy’s trauma to be incorporated into the narrative itself. When we achieve peace, we can begin to understand what allowed the occupation to last over the last 55 years,” he says. .
“There is a very small minority willing to acknowledge that the Palestinians have also suffered trauma. The impression is that if we recognize their trauma, then our trauma will be diminished or distorted.”
Grossman studied philosophy and theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is one of today’s leading Israeli writers. His work, which includes titles such as “Out of Time”, “A Mulher Fuge” and “O Inferno dos Outros”, has been translated into more than 30 languages.
In “A Vida Brinca Muito Comigo”, which is published by Companhia das Letras, he tells the story of three generations of women from an Israeli family who embark on a journey to revisit the past. They travel to Croatia, where the protagonist, Vera, was held prisoner in a detention camp of General Tito’s regime in the former Yugoslavia.
Vera was lucky to survive, unlike her parents, who had been sent to Nazi death camps. Still, prison left its mark not only on her, but also on her daughter, Nina, who grew up an orphan and would become an absentee mother.
Her granddaughter, Guili, the narrator of the story, harbors a deep hatred for her mother for having been abandoned in childhood. She takes it upon herself to record the family’s past in a documentary, and in the process she grows closer to Nina.
Intergenerational trauma is, therefore, the main thread of the narrative. On the one hand, it appears as a generator of family conflicts. But he also becomes the driving force of the characters’ reconciliation.
“The book is about a journey for these women to return to the place where the wound originated,” says Grossman. “Only then do they understand that they are not doomed to the pitfalls of this painful past.”
Also according to the author, the work provides lessons on how to keep your head held high in the face of authoritarianism by portraying Vera’s resilience in prison.
Vera’s character is inspired by Eva Panié Nahir, who was Grossman’s friend for two decades until her death in 2015 at the age of 97. “She was the bravest person I ever met,” says the writer.
“By rejecting the narratives imposed by the powerful, we cease to be helpless victims and become enclaves of freedom”, he says. “It’s a way to not be completely overwhelmed by the system, even when we know the battle is lost.”
