See under Love     by David Grossman, Translated by B Rosenberg Original title: ’Ayen ’erekh: ahavah Published by Picador USA Pub. Date: 2001 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 1.23 x 8.31 x 5.50 ISBN: 0312420692 List Price: $15.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.50 Published by Farrar Straus Giroux Not available for ordering Published by Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 1989 Not available for ordering Published by Washington Square Press Format: 1 pages Not available for ordering Published by Washington Square Press Pub. Date: 1989 Format: 1 pages Not available for ordering

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’There are no simple stories anymore’ says the children’s writer Anshel Wasserman to the German extermination camp commander when ordered to tell him ’a simple story’. And one need have no nostalgia for simple stories, if this astonishing, bold and imaginative work is anything to go by.

We start with Momik, a child growing up in Israel to parents and grandparents who have strange habits and mutter darkly about ’Over There’ and ’the Nazi Beast’. Momik, like any child, wants to know and to understand, so he sets about drawing his own conclusions on the basis of the scant information he can gather.

Grossman skilfully captures the blend of logic and fantasy which the child’s world consists of, at once the utter seriousness of dealing with grownups, noting down their words and actions like the best of detectives, and at the same time elaborating his own fantastical interpretations of them. Sometimes the research is frustrating: the whole family resolutely refuses to translate the words in German which Momik’s father screams out in his sleep, or to disclose where the buried treasure is which is locked with a combination whose numbers are marked on his parents’ and relatives’ arms. His research draws a blank, but Momik finds a seemingly promising source in Grandpa Anshel whose gibberish, Momik is sure, conceals a comprehensible thread which may even be the key to the whole enigma, and anyway ’only Momik knows how to handle him’.

The ’Nazi Beast’, Momik surmises, has frozen everything with its icy breath ’like the Snow Queen’, such that ’Over There everyone is covered in a very thin layer of glass that keeps them motionless, and you can’t touch them, and they’re sort of alive and sort of not...’. This is the potently anxious world of the child, but treated with a warm irony, such as the deadly serious attempts by Momik to tame the ’Nazi Beast’ by secretly cooping up in the cellar a range of animals from toads to ravens, hoping for their transformation... .

The child’s fantastical constructions set the tone for the book as a whole; a kaleidoscope of four superimposed and also interlocking tales, breathtaking in their range, surprisingly light given the difficulty of the themes and always retaining a fine line of coherence. The second section shows us an adult Momik, an aspiring writer living in Tel Aviv, now married and with a child. This adult Momik has a fascination for the writings of Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew shot down in the street of his home town by an S.S.-man. In one of Momik’s versions of Schulz’s death, the latter does not die, but plunges into the sea, the very same sea which laps the shores of Tel Aviv, a connection which sparks some extraordinary poetic writing: massed ranks of twisting and shining bodies (of which one is Bruno, surviving as a salmon...), gory fish massacres headed by sharp-toothed leaders, vast treks across reefs and currents, frenzies of fins and gills and bulbous eyes... .

If the sea fantasy is one way of talking about fighting back and survival, the third section is another, where Grandpa Anshel tells a story nightly to the camp commander. In this bold variation on the Arabian Nights theme, Anshel nurtures the only power he has; that his stories are all his own. Each word is poised on a knife edge as he plays on that last remnant of human need within Obersturmbannführer Neigel: the need for stories, for their seductive worlds, for their realms of possibility... Grossman never lets you forget the unbearable jarring of contexts — at its most powerful when in Anshel’s story a baby is born (but will he live?), while outside, again: trains, cudgels, dogs, smoke.

In contrast to this tensely claustrophobic world, the last section of the book, entitled The Complete Encyclopaedia of Kazik’s Life appears to abandon storytelling in the name of a pseudo-scientific classification of ’basic mechanisms animating all members of the human race’. At the same time, however, new narratives breed under cover of these encyclopaedic ambitions: we can ’see under’ the names of characters in Anshel’s stories, for example, and so we read stories within stories (within an encyclopaedia...). This section therefore also manages to subvert the cold classificatory logic and totalising pretensions which an encyclopaedia represents, infiltrating it with personal stories and with the general inchoate mess of the human (see under: ’eczema’, ’cigarette’, ’trap’, ’feelings’, even ’love’...).

If there is one thread worked and reworked through this extraordinarily inventive book, it is perhaps a question: how commemorate, in writing for example, someone or something who is dead? Or perhaps: how go on (to live, to write) in the face of deaths which no-one is left to commemorate and in the face of events which shake our capacity to comprehend them? David Grossman’s supple and mature writing looks both backwards and forwards, it turns back to the Holocaust while affirming a possible future, it works over old forms (children’s story, sea-ballad, encyclopaedia...), and breaks them open to bring out of them completely new worlds. This is a profound, beautifully written and utterly readable work.

’Sometimes they come into his room at night and stand next to his bed. They just want to take one last look at him before they start with the nightmares. That’s when Momik strains every muscle to look as if he’s asleep, to look like a healthy, happy boy, just as cheerful as he can be, always smiling, even in his sleep, ai-li-luli-luli, we have the most hilarious dreams around here, and sometimes he has a really Einsteiny idea, like when he pretends to be talking in his sleep and says, Kick it to me, Joe, we’re going to win this game, Danny, and things like that to make them happy, and once on a really horrible day when Grandfather wanted to go outside after supper and they had to lock him up in his room and he started hollering and Mama cried, well, that horrible day Momik pretended to be asleep and he sang them the national anthem and got so carried away he wet his bed, and all to make them understand they didn’t have to get so upset, they didn’t have to waste their fears on him or anything, they ought to be saving their strength for the really important things, like supper and their dreams and all the silences...’ p51