breathing with both lungs
David Grossman
Breathing With
Both Lungs
Translated from the Dutch by
Jessica Cohen
2015, Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei, Amsterdam
Breathing With Both Lungs
2015 David Grossman
Design:
Studio Ron van Roon
Every year a festive gathering in a different
province from the previous year is the start of the
National Celebration of the liberation of the
Netherlands at the end of the Second World War.
This gathering links the solemnity of the National
Act of Remembrance of the previous evening and
the exuberant festivities of the afternoon and
evening of 5 May. Every year the Nationaal Comité
4 en 5 mei invites a leading commentator to speak
on matters relating to Liberation, liberty, the rule of
law, and democracy.
This year, seventy years after the end of the
war, the Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei has invited
the Israeli author and essayist David Grossman to
give the annual 5 May lecture. The text of his
lecture, ‘Ademen met beide longen’ (Breathing with
Both Lungs), delivered in the Sint Jacobskerk in
Vlissingen (Flushing) in the presence of the prime
minister and numerous other invited guests, appears
below. David Grossman was born in Jerusalem in
1954.
After national service he studied philosophy and
theatre and became a prolific broadcaster. He has
written many novels, political essays and books for
children. Most of his books have been translated
into Dutch. His articles on the actuality of the
!5
Israeli-Palestinian conflict are published in
newspapers across the world.
For more information visit:
www.4en5mei.nl www.davidgrossman.nl
(Dutch only)
Breathing With Both Lungs
Shalom, good morning.
I would like to take you for a moment to my
childhood home in Jerusalem, in the 1960s, at
lunchtime. My brother and I would come back from
school excited and sweaty, bubbling with
experiences, stories, exaggerations, competing with
each other for our mother’s attention. At twenty past
one, as our mother ladled chicken soup, a woman’s
voice on the radio would announce the upcoming
“Search for Missing Relatives” program and
commence reading a list of names, life stories and
fates, condensed into one or two sentences:
Avraham
Schechter, son of Yosef and Luba, from Lodz, is
searching for his brother Yaakov, whom he last saw
at the train station; Miriam Federman, daughter of
Israel and Chana, from Drohobych, is looking for
her children Ephraim and Menashe, whom she lost
in the first deportation…”
Even now I feel goose bumps when I remember that
voice, which sounded like a quiet, desperate lamen-
!7
tation. Of course I did not comprehend all that was
embodied in the endless list of names – the terrible
plundering of life’s proper order hidden behind the
simple words. But I remember how my brother and
I would fall into an embarrassed silence tinged with
an odd sensation of guilt, and how in the bright
Israeli midday, a shadow would spread inside me. In
the announcer’s voice, and even more so in my
mother’s heavy silence, I seemed to hear the echo of
a “big bang” that had occurred not so long ago,
which had fatally wounded most of the grownups I
knew – an explosion whose human shrapnel roamed
the world, lost and lonely, searching for each other.
Sometimes I feel that the members of my
generation, the ones whose lunches were
accompanied for years by that gloomy, rhythmic
voice, lost their appetite. But not necessarily for
food: something more essential was lost. Something
that, when we were children, we did not fully
understand, but over the years we began to decipher.
Perhaps what we lost was the illusion of our
parents’ ability to protect us from the terrors of life;
perhaps we sensed the painful absence of a childlike
belief that is so essential for normal development: a
faith in man and in his kindness and compassion
towards his fellow human beings. And perhaps it
!9
was a burgeoning understanding, which also
embodied a sense of loss, that the nation we
belonged to was destined for an extreme and tragic
fate, unique among the fates of nations.
But before I talk about this nation and its fate, allow
me to speak about what, I believe, is at the heart of
this day here in Holland: freedom, or liberation
from tyranny and enslavement.
It has been seventy years since the Netherlands was
liberated from occupation. Seventy years since the
defeat of the Nazis and the end of the extermination
of the Jewish people—the Holocaust. The passage
of time is the same, but the reckoning is different.
Even an outsider like myself can say fairly
confidently, I think, that Holland’s liberation
ultimately led to its freedom. Whereas the Jewish
people, although liberated from the terror of
genocide, is still not free.
I find it interesting that you chose to invite an Israeli
author to talk about this freedom, because having
lived my entire life in wartime, experiencing the
paralysis and depletion that are intrinsic to a life of
constant violence, it is something I have never
known. Could it be that you thought it was the
absence of this freedom in my life that would make
!10
my longing for it so fervent, and that I could
therefore say something new about it?
Either way, I would like to begin with some
thoughts about a private, even intimate freedom,
which I believe I understand slightly better than the
“national” kind, and that is the freedom granted by
literature to both its readers and writers. Perhaps,
though, the fundamentals of this freedom are in fact
not unlike the more generalized, national freedom.
Ever since I became a writer, I have been drawn to
write about situations in which an individual faces a
threatening, enslaving power. I told the story of a
boy, the son of Holocaust survivors, who constantly
overhears anguished whispers about “the Nazi
beast” and decides to get himself such a beast and
tame it, so that it will stop torturing his parents; that
boy, Momik, grew up inside a stifling silence and
fought with all his might—with all the powers of
his childish imagination—to liberate his parents
from the paralyzing terror they lived in.1 I wrote
about Ora, the mother of an enlisted soldier, who
tries to defeat the arbitrary, belligerent mechanism
of war: she flees her house, refusing to accept news
of her son’s death, and tries to keep him alive by
telling his life story, recounting in detail the
thousands of moments that comprise the effort, the
!11
devotion, the pain and the love out of which one
person comes into being.2 In a different book I told
of an old Palestinian man who uses his imagination
and the ingenuity of his stories to fight the
impervious system of the Israeli occupation. I also
wrote about a group of parents who have lost their
children and who try, in their desperate, delirious
way, to fight the absolute and hermetic arbitrariness
of death.3
For thirty-five years I have been writing and
rewriting this struggle. In so doing, I have not
managed to diminish the world’s arbitrariness or
tyranny by even one iota, of course. But I have
discovered that if I write about the struggle over and
over again, and if each time I use different words,
fresh ideas, new characters and situations,
something in my stance against the tyranny and
arbitrariness shifts: I am no longer trapped in their
terrifying presence. No longer paralyzed, as I was
before I began writing. As I write, I see more and
more sharply the place inside me where I am still
free, and even if I have experienced a grave tragedy
—the harsh blow of arbitrariness—still I am not
doomed to be defined solely by this tragedy. I do
not have to be its passive victim. When I write it, it
does not erase me. I have learned that even in the
most extreme situations, a person still retains one
!12
small freedom: the freedom to describe his tragedy
in his own words.
Writers are familiar with the desire to give things
private names, to use one’s own names rather than
those imposed from “outside.” More powerful than
a desire, even, it is an instinct, an impulse. I
frequently think that a writer is someone who feels
claustrophobic inside other people’s words. And so
literature, among its other virtues, provides a way to
sharpen the reader’s instinctive aversion to cliché
and generalization; to all that tries to confine human
beings—so rich and contradictory—by binding
them to a splint of stereotypical, rigid, narrow
definitions.
Perhaps this is what offers the profound sense of
reward and even redemption that fills us when we
read a good book? For with every book that sweeps
us along, and with every whole, multi-faceted
literary character that enters our lives, we rediscover
the multitude of divergent possibilities contained in
every person. We may not even know how to
describe most of these possibilities, yet they exist in
us as silent longings, and sometimes as burdens, as
shadows of our soul, until we encounter a book that
animates them and gives them names. (Perhaps it is
!13
no coincidence that the Hebrew verb for bookpublishing literally means “bring out to the light.”)
*
It is not easy to admit this, but in our day-to-day
lives, over the years, we tend to slowly coagulate
into one clearly defined identity that is often
clenched and rigid. We are constantly “defined” by
others and by ourselves through generalizing, broad,
peremptory labels—of gender, of nationality, of
religion, of race. We are “a man” or “a woman”; we
are “Dutch” or “German”; we are “Israeli” or
“Palestinian”; “Muslim,” “Christian” or “Jewish”;
“rightwing” or “leftwing”; “lawyer,” “farmer” or
“journalist.” These labels provide us with a sense
of security, of belonging and identity. Except that
sometimes, particularly in times of crisis and sharp
contradictions between outside and inside, we may
feel the pain of having relinquished our plurality. Of
having lost touch with the rich strata of our
existence because we have sufficed with those
restrictive labels; because we have given up the
abundance of possibilities and nuances we used to
contain. It is the sorrow of the road not taken. The
sorrow of the many roads not taken.
!14
But once in a while, when we read a good book,
something starts to move inside us. Deep sediments
shift. Something in our rigid, artificial definitions
softens when we are touched by a literary figure
sketched with a fullness of life and internal
contradictions. Suddenly, as if we have heard a
distant melody or a forgotten voice calling our
name, we begin to move with flexibility and vitality
—for example, between the woman we are and the
man we are; between the old man we will be one
day and the child we were; between the sanity and
the madness inside us; or, between the Israeli I am
and the Palestinian I might have been. We are
reminded of the possibility of a different existence,
a different way of being in the world. And a
different way of seeing ourselves through the eyes
of another—sometimes these are the eyes of our
enemy, who sees in us things we would prefer not to
see or know about ourselves, and other times they
are eyes that see in us the goodness and innocence
we thought we had lost.
As we read, we feel the book seep into us, meld
with us, melt away knots, taking us back to our
primeval, unprocessed, pre-verbal foundations. That
is the moment when the book reads us. That is the
great offering of literature: like a wolf howling
outside our window at night, standing on our
!15
manicured square of lawn, it extracts from us—
from the depths of our protected, secured existence
—a wail of response and surrender.
This wave of yearning may last a single moment (or
for one single book). But what spiritual elevation
and freedom that moment contains, when for an
instant we are someone else; when for a brief
moment we break free from the prison of ourselves.
*
There is also another kind of freedom, which, as I
mentioned, I am not familiar with, and which we
commemorate today, seventy years after its birth:
the freedom of peace. Of life without war.
What can I tell you about peace? What do I know of
peace? Clearly, you know far more about it than I
do. I am a citizen of a violent conflict that has been
going on for over a century. All of its participants,
Israelis and Palestinians, were born into it, and most
do not believe it will ever be resolved. Most, it
seems, have resigned themselves to the idea that
they will always live in a continuous cycle of war.
That their lives will be forever diminished, fearful,
devoid of the fullness of being, simply surviving
from one disaster to the next.
!16
Those who are willing to keep living like that have
effectively declared themselves victims, helpless
casualties of circumstances beyond their control. It
is difficult and humiliating to endure such a
worldview. As an Israeli and as a Jew, I find it hard
to accept. After all, the wondrous idea behind
establishing the State of Israel, three years after the
Holocaust, was that Jews would never again be
victims. That they would have one place in the
world where they could attain sovereignty and
liberty.
One of the most troubling burdens borne by Jews
throughout history was that they never felt “at
home” in the world. Even in the few places where
Jewish minorities were treated well, they lived in
constant fear, in perpetual readiness for injury,
persecution, expulsion. The State of Israel was
intended to be that home—in every sense of the
word. But during the sixty-seven years of its
existence, it has failed to become a place where its
inhabitants feel safe and tranquil, where they attain
the demilitarized serenity that people feel in their
homes.
I shall say it simply: Israel will not be a home until
the Palestinians have their own home. The
Palestinians will not have a home until Israel is a
!17
real home to the Jews who live in it. Israelis and
Palestinians will not be able to enjoy a sense of
security, of a solid existence and a purposeful life, if
they do not live in peace with each other.
Palestinians and Israelis will not attain peace if they
are unable to view the conflict from their enemy’s
perspective, through the lens of the other side’s
wounds and consciousness.
Above all, until these things occur, we—Israelis and
Palestinians—will not have freedom. Freedom in its
most profound sense: freedom from perpetual
existential anxiety. Freedom from paralyzing
despair. Freedom from the constant exertion of
hatred and war. Freedom from the exhaustion of
having to always be an enemy.
Yes: Peace is freedom. Perhaps here, in the
Netherlands, after seventy years without war, you
no longer remember that peace is not something to
be taken for granted, and that it enables so many
different kinds of freedom, internal and external. I
remember one such moment of freedom, about
twenty years ago. I was traveling in Holland with
my family. We visited the home of Eva Cossee and
Christoph Buchwald, my publishers and close
friends. My two sons, Yonatan and Uri, went down
to the square in front of the house and watched the
!18
local kids play soccer. They were soon invited to
join the game. I do not presume to idealize the
relationship between different sectors of the
population in the Netherlands, but I do know that
some Dutch kids invited my sons to play with them,
Yonatan and Uri enthusiastically agreed, and within
moments they were part of the group. I stood
watching from the window and thought how
beautiful it was, how natural and simple. And I
thought how rare it would be to see a moment like
that in Israel: children inviting complete strangers
into a soccer game without fear, without reluctance,
without suspicion.
I have lived my whole life in the Middle East, in
Israel, without experiencing even one moment of
true, complete peace. Of true, complete freedom.
Without knowing the whole, unthreatened sense of
existential security that enables people to walk
around without constant fear and vigilance. The
sensation that would allow me to breath fully,
unburdened by anxiety—to breathe with both lungs.
For me, peace is a type of freedom that I constantly
try to revive in my imagination, so that I can at least
maintain my own access to it. So that I can prevent
it from becoming clogged up and sealed off—
because of the anxieties that close in on me, because
of the murderous violence that pervades my
surroundings, because of the anguish over all those
!19
who have lost their lives in a conflict that could
have been resolved long ago. Because of my grief
for my son, who was killed in a war that could have
been prevented.
*
On days when I despair of the prospect of peace and
try to picture a soul that is truly free, that can
remain free even under the harshest conditions of
enslavement, a soul that I can look to in moments of
hopelessness, I think of Etty Hillesum. Etty, as you
know, was a young, courageous, soul-baring woman
who lived here in the Netherlands during World War
II, willingly entered Westerbork concentration
camp, and was eventually murdered, like so many
Dutch Jews.
This is what she wrote in her diary: “When I lay
awake at night on my plank, among women and
young girls softly snoring, dreaming out loud,
quietly weeping and tossing and turning; women
who in daylight would say, ‘I don’t want to think,’
‘I don’t want to feel or else I’ll lose my mind’; at
night I would sometimes be filled with enormous
tenderness, and I would lie awake […] and say to
myself: ‘May I be the thinking heart of the camp. I
want to be the thinking heart again. I would like to
!20
be the thinking heart of an entire concentration
camp.’” 4(From An Interrupted Life, p. 16)
All of us here today live in far better and easier
circumstances than Etty Hillesum’s when she wrote
those lines. Yet we know that at any moment each
of us may find him- or herself in a situation where
we lose our freedom and are surrounded by
arbitrariness and tyranny, whether natural or
manmade. Whether from a disease of the body or
the soul, or from the ills of racism, nationalism, or
religious and political fanaticism of the kind that
have long threatened to beset Europe and endanger
all that is precious and good and free in it today.
And if such a moment arrives, if we are ever shut
behind the gates of a real or metaphorical
concentration camp, will we have the courage, the
strength, and the benevolence to wish for what Etty
wished in her diary—to be the thinking heart of an
entire concentration camp? Will we be capable,
even in such a place, of persevering in the private,
heroic rebellion of always being the heart, always
thinking?
To be the thinking heart. Again and again, the
thinking heart.
There is no greater freedom.
!21
(Endnotes)
1. See Under: Love
2. To the End of the Land
3. Falling Out of Time
4. Etty. De nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum,
1941-1943.
!22