ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS HAIL WRITERS AND THE WORD, JUST NOT WITH ONE ANOTHER
By ETHAN BRONNER
New York Times
leeast/07jerusalem.html
May 6 2010
JERUSALEM
There are moments in this splintered and hardhearted city when
skeptics become believers. Thursday night — the ancient walls
lighted up, the air filled with honeysuckle and jasmine — felt
like such a moment. Distinguished foreign authors and talented local
musicians threw themselves into a celebration of literature, music
and international fellowship.
But while this is a city of stones, it is also a city of mirrors.
There was not one party on Thursday but two, Israeli and Palestinian,
each oblivious to the other.
The Palestine Festival of Literature and the International Writers
Festival of Israel both took place this week without mutual awareness
or acknowledgment, and each closed Thursday night with readings and
songs. Both festivals were ostensibly about the beauty of words,
but neither could avoid the grimness of deeds.
"Everyone here is obsessed with restoring some part of the past,"
observed Amos Oz, Israel’s most celebrated writer, at the Israeli
festival earlier in the week. "Many came to Jerusalem not to build
and be rebuilt but to crucify or be crucified."
Still, power relations are hardly equal here and there was no escaping
at either conference the suffering brought upon the Palestinians
by Israeli security policies, although there were nuances of
interpretation.
"I was infuriated," said Nancy Kricorian, a New York City novelist and
poet who visited here for the first time as part of the Palestinian
festival and faced military checkpoints and the separation barrier.
The question that hovered at both festivals was how the reading of
good books could make a difference. Nir Baram, a young Israeli writer
who addressed the opening of the Israeli festival, offered an answer.
"Kafka said that a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea
within us," he said. "There are many things that we don’t talk about,"
and he included among those "the systematic confiscation of the rights
of non-Jews in Israel and the territories." He said Israelis had
stopped noticing it, the way those who live by the sea stop hearing
the waves. His comments caused a stir among several members of the
government who were in the audience.
The writers at the Palestinian events knew nothing of Mr. Baram’s talk
but they would have been interested. They spent the week traveling
around the West Bank from universities to cultural centers, and got a
dose of Israeli checkpoints and Palestinian frustration that included
five hours at the Jordan-West Bank border while Israeli officials
questioned those with Arabic names.
In Ramallah, in the garden of an old house used by the late Palestinian
poet Mahmoud Darwish, Ms. Kricorian read on Wednesday from her novel
"Zabelle," based on the harsh experiences of her Armenian grandmother
at the hands of the Turks. The reading told of displacement and
suffering, painfully familiar themes in the audience.
Another writer, Mahmoud Shuqeir, a Palestinian, brought down the house
with laughter as he recounted a story of his in which Michael Jackson,
Naomi Campbell and Donald Rumsfeld are brought as guests to Ramallah.
Long story short: his uncle ends up a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay.
The Israelis didn’t get to hear that one. But a night earlier, in
Jerusalem, in a city-owned guesthouse for writers and artists known
as Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the Israeli author David Grossman and the
American novelist Paul Auster chatted onstage about their writing
routines, their friendship and their fears.
It was a sparkling conversation covering, among other things, the
surprising pleasure of narrating a novel in the voice of a woman and
the pain of saying goodbye to characters after a work is completed.
"It’s like being a couple," Mr. Grossman said of living with his own
invented characters. "You change each other." Mr. Auster, accompanied
to the festival by his wife, the author Siri Hustvedt, agreed. He
spoke of the current pause in his life, having recently finished a
novel but not yet started the next one. The talk turned soon enough
to what Israelis call "hamatzav," "the situation."
Mr. Auster was last here in early 1997 and was struck by the darker
mood he now found. Thirteen years ago, peace between Israel and its
neighbors seemed a real likelihood. Not today, he said. Despite the
presence in town of George J. Mitchell, the Obama administration’s
Middle East envoy, today things seem worse. Israel, he said, worries
about its very survival.
Again, it seemed like the two groups of writers could benefit from
hearing one another’s reflections. Should the festivals meet? Should
Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, A. B. Yehoshua and Daniel
Mendelsohn, all of whom were speakers in Israel, join Geoff Dyer,
Victoria Brittain and Raja Shehadeh, the writers on the other side?
Yes, said Anthony David, an American biographer and professor at the
Bard Honors College of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. "It is
ridiculous to have writers from all over the world in the same city
and not meeting each other," he said as he waited in Ramallah for
a reading to begin. "The boycott thinking here among Palestinians
is so entrenched that people are threatened by meeting people from
the Israeli side. Building networks is the only way to undermine
nefarious forces."
But Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian-British author who runs the Palestinian
festival, disagreed. "I feel that Palestinians are too often seen as
an adjunct or reverse side of another coin," she said. "Palestine is
an entity in its own right and it deserves its own festival. If the
day comes when Jerusalem is a shared capital, then we can reconsider."
One of her guest writers, Adam Foulds, who read at the festival from
his narrative poem, "Broken Words," said he understood.
Mr. Foulds, who is a British Jew, spent a year on an Israeli kibbutz
17 years ago and had never been to the Palestinian cities of the West
Bank. He was surprised by what he found.
"You hear so much about the rage, the violent mood," he said, "but I
have found a language of peace, freedom and justice. The festival is
recognition of the independent life of the Palestinian people. Coming
through the invisible barrier of fear has actually filled me with
hope. I found deep humanity on the other side."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 7, 2010
A picture caption in an earlier version of this article misidentified
the Indian writer on screen. She is Arundhati Roy, not Ritu Menon.