Nicole Krauss

Author of “Forest Dark”

Israel first showed up in literature, in the book of Genesis, as an idea: God’s idea, to be precise, someplace Abraham hadn’t yet been, but where he needed to go to in order to become something. It proved a compelling one, with real pathos and propulsive narrative power (see: Exodus). But by the time those first works of Jewish literature were being composed, Israel was a reality — the opposite of an idea: in flux, raw, complex, messy — and it wasn’t long before that reality took over the narrative, adrenalizing it and complicating it morally. No one would mistake Abraham or Moses for flesh-and-blood men, or even literary characters in the modern sense, individuals with their own private meaning. But along with the reality of Israel came David — wily, charismatic, cunning, magnetic, brutal, a hero so flawed that he could only be real. A cutthroat warrior, a murderer, an ambitious politician hungry for power, willing to do whatever it took to become king, a man who manipulated the love of Saul, Jonathan, Michal, Bathsheba, of everyone who ever came close to him. A historical David almost certainly existed: In 1993, an inscription was found at Tel Dan in the north of Israel, which dates from the ninth century B.C., and refers to the “The House of David.” Who knows who and what that David really was? But in the hands of the genius who wrote the Book of Samuel, David’s live spark, and his real Israel, became the raw material for one of literature’s greatest and most iconic characters.

How many times has Israel swung from idea to reality and back again? It was an idea when Moses led the Jews toward it through the desert, and then it was real for a while until Nebuchadnezzar razed it in the sixth century B.C., after which it became an idea again during 50 years of exile, when Jews yearned for it, wrapped their souls around it and spilled verses of poetry about it while they prospered in Babylon. From the time that Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Judea again, they were subject first to the Persians, then to a series of Hellenistic kingdoms and finally to the Romans, and during that time Israel was neither fully a reality — an independent political entity — nor solely an idea. Some might try to argue that after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, Israel was returned again to the realm of Jewish idea, where it remained for nearly two millenniums, until in the early 20th century it shifted from an idea about origin, about the distant past, to an idea about being and about the near future. It shifted from pathos to pragmatism and through force of violent will was soon pressed back into existence again, restored to reality. Others might point out that as Jews continued to dwell on the land after the destruction of the Temple, and produce works of great importance like the Mishnah and the Palestinian Talmud, Israel continued to function as reality for the minority who remained behind in the Levant, while it became an idea for the majority in exile. What is indisputable is that for more than 2,500 years, ideas of Israel operated on the Jewish psyche as powerfully as the historical realities of the place, and more often than not were more primary and active than its reality.

The idea of modern Israel entered literature in 1902 in Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel, “Altneuland,” but at what point did the reality of modern Israel begin to take over the narrative of Jewish literature? Was it with the emergence of the novels by the first generation of writers who grew up in it and were shaped by its society, writers like Amos Oz and David Grossman, or was it when it proved irresistible as a subject to American Jewish writers like Philip Roth? Of his novels set in Israel, “The Counterlife” was published in 1986 and “Operation Shylock” in 1993. The reality of Israel was already decades old by then, old enough to be noisy with attributes and crisis, but still too young to achieve autonomy from the idea that engendered it, one that Israeli schoolchildren and soldiers are indoctrinated in: that the foundation of their state was an act of self-preservation after the Holocaust. For that autonomy to happen, Israeli society needed to surprise itself, to stumble into its own generative powers, which happened with the explosion of Tel Aviv culture, or rather counterculture, in the first years of the 21st century. As Israeli artists, inventors and youth claimed the city, the culture they began to pump out was the antithesis of the one at large that grew out of a diasporic, Ashkenazi, religious, post-Holocaust idea. Instead, it was a modern, secular, Middle Eastern reality without cultural precedent. For the first time in the country’s history, there was new Israeli music, food, art and humor that reflected the physical and emotional reality of a fraught and urgent Jewish existence whose context is Arabic rather than European. It’s no coincidence that Israeli society hijacked the narrative of itself around the time that modern Hebrew, also forcibly willed into fresh existence, fully caught up with the complex conditions of the lives of its native speakers: For language itself is generative, and to be able to describe is to be in the possession of creative power.