The movie will premiere on July 2 and will be shown several more times during the festival. It will also be broadcast on KAN 11, which was among the producers of the film, on a date to be announced.
It is one of a number of films about the arts at Docaviv this year. Director Adi Arbel avoids all the pitfalls of conventional documentaries about writers by simply letting Grossman be himself. The movie mixes interviews with footage of him at a meeting with several of his translators from around the world; on a visit to a rural area of Croatia to do research for his book More Than I Love My Life, the English translation of which will be published in August; footage from a documentary about Grossman’s visits to the West Bank as research for his nonfiction work The Yellow Wind; clips of interviews and lectures he has given over the years; and home movies and photographs of his family; as well as a few joint interviews with him and his wife.
While you may have heard and read a great deal about Grossman, one aspect of the documentary that you will not find elsewhere is the opportunity to hear him reading from his own works, which he does with great eloquence.
Rather than show literary experts extolling the virtues of his books – tributes that so often add little to what viewers already know – Arbel allows Grossman to talk about the inextricable connections between his life and his work.
While there are many distinguished Israeli writers, Grossman is perhaps Israel’s most surprising author, one whose work takes off in unpredictable directions. His books are uniquely Israeli but have touched readers all over the world. They have been translated into dozens of languages, and in 2017, he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize (along with his translator, Jessica Cohen) for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar. Superficially, the outlines of his life sound ordinary, but as the documentary makes clear, his perceptions of life and how he has made use of them in his writing are extraordinary.
Born in Jerusalem to a modest family, Grossman discusses how he discovered a deep connection to the Jewish past through reading Sholem Aleichem. When he became interested in the Holocaust, it felt real to him because of his connection to Aleichem’s characters. He speaks about his consciousness of death at an early age and how it shattered him but also pushed him to write. While he was always drawn toward writing, he says, having a family often pushed him out of that comfort zone. In photos of him on trips and hikes with his young children, he often sits and writes, sometimes using his sun hat for a desk.
The film makes it clear how the tug-of-war between solitary writing and the demands of a family mirrors his struggle to embrace life while remaining aware of the reality of death. The saddest but also the most riveting section of the film is when he, sometimes alone and sometimes with his wife, talks about his son Uri’s death. Uri Grossman was a soldier who was killed in action toward the very end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. Bizarrely, he had almost finished writing a novel about a woman who goes on a journey to avoid getting news of her soldier son’s death that she is sure is coming.
At the shiva for Uri, Grossman tells how he was approached by Amos Oz and AB Yehoshua, and told them that he was planning to give up working on the book.
“The book will save you,” he recalls one of them telling him, and it became To the End of the Land, which many consider to be his greatest work.
The documentary also looks briefly at Grossman’s career as a writer of children’s books, and in this category as well he is one of Israel’s finest authors. Many years ago, I met him at a party and told him I had just read one of his Itamar books to my sons, which they loved.
“I put half of Israel to sleep every night,” he joked. That same quality of modesty mixed with humor shines through the movie.