Writing in the Dark or Quiet Strength

Writing in the Dark: Essays

Author: David Grossman

Recent essays on Israel, literature, and language from one of the country's most respected and best-loved voices Throughout his career, David Grossman has been a voice for peace and reconciliation between Israel and its Arab citizens and neighbors. In six new essays on politics and culture in Israel today, he addresses the conscience of a country that has lost faith in its leaders and its ideals. This collection includes an already famous speech concerning the disastrous Second Lebanon War of 2006, the war that took the life of Grossman’s twenty-year-old son, Uri.  Moving, humane, clear-sighted, and courageous, touching on literature and artistic creation as well as politics and philosophy, these writings are a cri de coeur from a heroic voice of reason at a time of uncertainty and despair. 

Publishers Weekly

Peace activist and vocal advocate for "relinquishing the Territories and ending the Occupation," Israeli novelist Grossman is unafraid of controversy; these six essays, however, address these concerns more obliquely, through the lens of literature. "Books That Have Read Me" merges the young reader's discovery that "books are the place in the world where both the thing and the loss of it can be contained" with the older writer's urge "to describe contemporary political reality in a language that is not the public, general, nationalized idiom." Grossman's passions are two-an Israel at peace with its neighbors and a citizenry restored to dignity through the individual language of literature, which "can bring us together with the fate of those who are distant and foreign." Grossman lays claim to an "acquired naïveté" in his hopefulness; how welcome and enlightening it is. (Oct.)

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David Keymer - Library Journal

Reflecting on the historical trauma that preceded the birth of his young country and conditioned its citizens' response to subsequent threats, Israeli novelist and essayist Grossman writes of his childhood in the 1950s: "In my neighborhood, people screamed every night from their nightmares." Besides being powerful imagery, that quote explains the environment in which Grossman operates. This slim book may seem limited in its appeal-four essays are on writing fiction in Israel, two on the need for peace with Israel's neighbors-but Grossman's ruminations are pertinent to us all. What can the fiction writer offer us in a world under continual siege, where external threat deadens our response to others' suffering and we dehumanize our enemies to make it easier to deal with them? Fiction writers, argues Grossman, have the rare opportunity to see other people as people, resisting the impulse to demonize them. "To write about the enemy means, primarily, to think about the enemy...even if he [the writer] is absolutely convinced of his own justness and the enemy's malice and cruelty." These essays are all worth reading, but the four on writing are exceptional. This heartfelt book, with a lasting impact, is enthusiastically recommended for larger general collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Israeli novelist Grossman (Her Body Knows, 2005, etc.) muses about authors who have influenced him and about the difficulties of living and writing in one of the world's most dangerous places. In these six slender essays, most originally delivered as speeches, the author discusses his passionate belief in the redemptive powers of literature. Grossman recalls reading Sholem Aleichem at his father's urging when he was a boy, then later realizing that the people he read about in those tales were the sorts of people who had died in the Holocaust. He alludes to other literary mentors-Kafka, Mann, Boll, Woolf-and writes amusingly about the influence of Bruno Schulz, whom he'd not read until a reader informed him that his work sounded like Schulz's. He writes compellingly of "the Other," examining our fear of those who are not like us and the analogous fear of the "others" who dwell inside us, whom we struggle to control. Grossman, who lost a son in military action in Lebanon, reveals the ability to view the world from perspectives other than his own; he tries to enter the minds of, say, Palestinians, just as he attempts to inhabit the lives of his fictional characters. Until people have hope in a peaceful future, he declares, chaos continues and powerful leaders easily control us by frightening us and appealing to the worst aspects of our nature. Living in fear and hopelessness leads to "a shrinking of our soul's surface," he writes, and fear constricts not just the political landscape but language itself. Grossman ponders the metaphor of Israel's borders, which have shifted continually since the nation's birth. Repeatedly, he yearns for a time when stability replaces fragility and hopetriumphs over fear. His final piece blasts the current Israeli leadership for exacerbating conditions in the region. Affecting essays that emphasize our common humanity.

Table of Contents:

Books That Have Read Me 3

The Desire to Be Gisella 29

Writing in the Dark 59

Individual Language and Mass Language 69

Contemplations on Peace 87

Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Rally 121

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Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation

Author: Rosa Parks

On June 15, 1999, Mrs. Rosa Parks was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor -- a tribute to the power of one solitary woman to influence the soul of a nation. But awards and influence were far from her mind when, on December 1, 1955, she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was not trying to start a movement. She was simply tired of social injustice and did not think a woman should be forced to stand so that a man could sit down. Yet her simple act of courage set in motion a chain of events that changed forever the landscape of American race relations. Quiet Strength celebrates the principles and convictions that have guided her through a remarkable life. It is a printed record of her legacy -- her lasting message to a world still struggling to live in harmony.