A lost son of Israel

In his profound new novel, David Grossman explores the grieving soul of a nation in conflict

September 26, 2010|Saul Austerlitz, Globe Correspondent

In recent years, through a series of tragic events, the Israeli novelist David Grossman has become more a part of the story than its teller. Grossman’s son Uri, a soldier, was killed on the last day of combat of the 2006 Lebanon war, and Grossman engaged in an acrimonious, yet strangely tender, public battle with then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over the necessity of the incursion. Since his son’s death, Grossman has become more than a novelist; he has become the public face of the shriveling Israeli left, its icon of sacrifice and valor and moral outrage.

Now, Grossman’s novel “To the End of the Land,” written while Uri was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, and completed after his death, has been published in English, and it can be difficult to resist looking for biographical parallels between the life of the writer and his tale of a family fearing the loss of a soldier son. There is, however, a larger, more profound sense of finality to Grossman’s work; it is not merely a single soldier who is facing death here, but an entire country. Is the book’s title a place? A time? A drinking toast? Is this the musing of an anguished father sure that the end of his son’s story is the end of everything, or something more specific? The answer shifts with the book’s moods, and its characters, but that mournfulness — the sense of an ending — never entirely evaporates.

Like its back story, the book is rooted in the workings of a family — in this case, the middle-aged Ora, her estranged husband, Ilan, and their two sons, Adam and Ofer. Ofer, wrapping up three years of mandatory military service, voluntarily re-enlists to fight in Gaza, skipping out on a hiking trip he and his mother had been planning. Ora, superstitiously convinced that staying home means leaving herself open to receiving word of Ofer’s death, decides to flee into the wilderness. She also brings along the shadow member of her family: the damaged Avram, her adolescent love and Ofer’s absentee biological father.