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JEWISH BOOK ANNUAL
forgotten that humanity and morality are still important ques
tions and to warn of the future implied by the present.”3
For several years, Grossman earned his living as a lively, en
tertaining, and insightful commentator on Israel Radio. When
he stepped down some four years ago, he already had a bu r
geoning career as a Hebrew writer, having published a book
of short stories, two novels, and a series of magazine articles
on life in the West Bank that were to become a controversial
political book. Most recently, Grossman has published a play
and a third novel.4 Of his six books, the three that have ap
peared in English,5
The Smile of the Lamb, See Under: Love,
and
The Yellow Wind
have earned him almost unanimous critical ac
claim in the United States. When, for example, what is consid
ered his literary masterpiece,
See Under: Love,
was published
in America in 1989, it was received by reviewers as “a major
Israeli novel,” “a dazzling work of the imagination,” and “a wor
thy successor to works of similar mythic dimension by William
Faulkner, Gunter Grass, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” What
distinguished tha t complicated and difficult novel was
Grossman’s innovative artistic imagination and his very Jewish
insistence that the arts of make-believe may be the most efficient
instrument of redemption available, on both a historical and
a personal scale.
FICTION IN
THE YELLOW WIND
Nowhere is Grossman’s
need
for fiction more prominently dis
played than in his non-fiction, specifically in
The Yellow Wind,
3. David Grossman.
The Yellow Wind.
Trans, by Haim Watzman. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. (Referred to in the body o f the text as
TYW
.) This quotation comes from the Introduction to the paperback edition
(Delta, 1989), pages un-numbered.
4. Grossman’s Hebrew works are published in Israel by Ha-Kibbutz Ha-
Me’uhad. They include:
Ratz (The Jogger,
stories), 1983;
Hiyukh Ha-Gedi
(The Smile o f the Lamb,
a novel), 1983;
Ayein Erekh: Ahava (See Under: Love,
a novel), 1986;
Ha-Zeman Ha-Tzahov (The Yellow Wind,
essays), 1987;
Gan
Riki (Riki’s Kindergarten,
a play), 1988; and
Sefer Ha-Dikduk Ha-Penimi (The
Book o f Interior Grammar,
a novel), 1991.
5. Grossman’s American publishers are Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Publica
tion dates o f the novels, trans. by Betsy Rosenberg, are:
See Under: Love,
1989, and
The Smile o f the Lamb,
1990. (This last is referred to in the body
o f the text as
SOL.)