They are couples who find each other, loves that struggle to blossom, passions that surprise those who are protagonists, children who accompany their fathers until the last moment and fathers who amaze their children with their vitality. And again, men who discover within themselves parental skills that they didn’t know they possessed and women who try to recover the relationship with the children they didn’t raise after decades. Dozens of characters, young and old, men and women, sometimes little more than teenagers, in other words a small world that never ceases to question itself, very often marveling, about what it feels for those around it, or would like to be around it.
Once again, in the twenty stories that make up the collection entitled Ties (translation by Raffaella Scardi, pp. 318, 19 euros), which in our country inaugurates the catalog of the new Gramma/Feltrinelli publishing brand, Eshkol Nevo demonstrates his ability to investigate not only feelings and the human soul, desire like the sense of loss, but also the way in which what we feel for each other is able to question us and question us at every moment.
Stories written before the terrible attack by Hamas on 7 October and the subsequent tragic Israeli response in Gaza, in which however the full drama and unresolved issues of the Middle Eastern situation emerge. Among the guests of the Turin Book Fair – where he will be on Saturday 11 May for two events, at 2.30 pm in the Sala Azzurra and at 5.30 pm in the Bosco degli Scrittori – the Israeli writer will present Ties Monday 6 May at the Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan in dialogue with Valeria Parrella (6.30 pm, viale Pasubio 5).
Let’s start from the title: what really holds the stories in this collection together, given that the bonds they investigate come in all forms, one might say from love to its opposite?
I can answer in two ways. The simplest one is to say that the book tells the many ways in which we are linked to others: parents, children, partners or friends. If instead we want to dig a little deeper, I think we can say that what holds the stories together is the element of time: that is, the way in which the passage of time, the passing of the years also influences what we feel, about how we look at others, about the questions we ask ourselves and answer differently at twenty, forty or sixty years old. It is no coincidence that the book could also have been titled “A Question of Time”, like one of the stories it contains.
Although the stories he tells are very different from each other, one has the feeling that a feeling of resilience emerges from all of them which leads the protagonists to imagine a possibility of a future even in the worst conditions. An attitude that also seems to characterize the characters of his previous works…
If you think about it, this is probably the case. Even if it’s not something I did deliberately, but rather an outcome of my way of looking at life. My parents are both psychologists, but also people who have always worked hard and who have always tried to encourage me to do something to change the situation I could find myself in. Let’s say that in my house it was difficult to be able to say one was lazy or desperate to the point of losing all hope and resigning oneself to doing nothing. And I think I have somehow put this in all my characters who perhaps don’t make the right choices, or make decidedly wrong ones: the point is that even a mistake can be at the origin of a story worth telling.
In one story, Yonathan explains to Dave that the psychiatric hospital where he is hospitalized is located on what remains of the village of Deir Yassin, where in 1948 more than one hundred Palestinians, women, old people and children were massacred. And how those ghosts continue to knock on the doors of those who live there. The story is titled “Everything is fragile” and seems to tell us that the bonds it talks about concern, above all in a painful way, the relationship between the two peoples of that land…
The reflection around fragility can have two meanings. On a psychological level: the moment you understand that the person in front of you is vulnerable and fragile, then, perhaps, you can also accept and forgive them. Thus, Shikma, Yonathan’s sister, tells Dave: «To be friends with my brother you have to accept the fact that he is fragile and will not always be able to be there for you. Sometimes he will disappear.” And I think the psyche of Israel has something tragic: we are trained for this fragility of existence. You go out in the morning and you don’t know if you’ll come back in the evening, you have a daughter who’s in the military, as is my case now, which means you have to take into account that maybe she won’t come home again. Israelis are very good at improvising because life in Israel is constant improvisation, because reality can hit you at any moment. The other side of the coin is that, just like what happens to Jonathan, not everyone is able to handle all these demons that are constantly around them, they cannot accept having to constantly deal with this bloody history and the possibility that something terrible happens. This is why in the collection I also speak several times about Israelis who have chosen to no longer live in Israel.
After October 7, you met some of the survivors of the Hamas attack and relatives of the hostages. One of her interlocutors asked her: «Help us find a new story. What we told ourselves about our safe life has been broken.” Can you imagine what this “new story” could be like and what your contribution as a writer?
I answer her the same way I answered that day: I don’t know what this new story could be, but it’s important to think about it. Personally, after October 7th, I think I committed myself to becoming a sort of writer-therapist, not someone who comes in and gives a nice speech, or writes an impressive article, but rather to be as close as possible to these people who are physically hurt or emotionally. Mostly, in the last six months I’ve tried to talk to people, to write to tell their stories. My contribution as a writer was this: allowing them to tell their stories and learn the stories of others who they had never met before October 7th. Establish a bond, to go through this pain together, to try to return, despite everything, to look to the future with hope.
How much has Israel changed after October 7?
I believe there are two decisive aspects. The first concerns the fact that that day the sense of security in which many of us felt we lived was shattered. Now people no longer feel safe even in their own homes, and it’s a feeling we need to find again. And then there is another story that many told each other that has been shattered: that is to say that the conflict with the Palestinians may not be addressed directly, all in all we can leave things as they are and that’s it. Here, the awareness of all this implies a sort of forced awakening: this conflict must not only be “managed”, it must be resolved.
In the aftermath of October 7, you painfully admitted that you struggle to feel empathy for the population of Gaza, that you are unable to separate those civilians from the Hamas terrorists. Now your outlook has changed, how do you evaluate what is happening in the Strip and the possibility that a path will be reopened for coexistence or for the two-state hypothesis?
I believe that we can now do something that seemed, to me like many others, impossible in the days following October 7th. Making a clear distinction between, on the one hand, the citizens of Gaza, families, women, children and, on the other, Hamas which is a terrorist organization, is essential for empathy to prevail. Indeed, I would say that even more than empathy, today I feel, also in this case like many others in Israel, the full gravity of the tragedy to which the people living in Gaza are exposed at this moment. Affirming this also means reiterating that we do not want to be in any way like Hamas which has never made this distinction. As for the possibilities for the future, empathy is the first step, if not towards coexistence, at least in the direction of peace between the two peoples: because we must always remember that “Israelis” and “Palestinians” does not mean an acronym or a specific organization or government, but two populations made up of people, of human beings who first of all must learn to meet. Or to start doing it again.
