More Than I Love My Life

Rafael was fifteen years old when his mother died and put him out of her misery. Rain poured down on the mourn-ers huddled under umbrellas in the small kibbutz cemetery. Tuvia, Rafael s father, sobbed bitterly. He had cared for his wife devotedly for years and now looked lost and bereft. Rafael, wearing shorts, stood apart from the others and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his eyes so that no one would know he wasn t crying. He thought: Now that she s dead, she can see all the things I thought of her.

That was in the winter of 1962. A year later his father met Vera Novak, who had come to Israel from Yugoslavia, and they became a couple. Vera had arrived with her only daughter, Nina, a tall, fair- haired girl of seventeen whose long face, which was pale and very beautiful, showed almost no expression.

The boys in Rafael s class called Nina Sphinx. They would sneak behind her and mimic her gait, the way she hugged her body and stared ahead vacantly. When she once caught two kids imitating her, she simply pummeled them bloody. They d never seen such fighting on the kibbutz. It was hard to believe how much ferocious strength she had in her thin arms and legs. Rumors started flying. They said that while her mother was a political prisoner in the Gulag, little Nina had lived on the streets. The streets, they said, with a meaningful look. They said that in Belgrade she d joined a gang of feral kids who kidnapped children for ransom. That s what they said. People say things.

The fight, as well as other incidents and rumors, failed to pierce the fog in which Rafael lived after his mother s death. For months he was in a self-induced coma. Twice a day, morning and evening, he took a powerful sleeping pill from his mother s medicine cabi-net. He didn t even notice Nina when he occasionally ran into her around the kibbutz.

But one evening, about six months after his mother died, he was taking a shortcut through the avocado orchard to the gym-nasium when Nina

David Grossman

INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE

Cast[s] a spell that lingers . . . Grossman s evocative gifts are in full force [and] his understanding of the opaque ways of love sometimes subterranean, often unexpected or arbitrary is unmatched . . . [His] novels have a cumulative power that subsumes mere plausibility. He succeeds in transcending the permutations of his plots and the localness of his settings indeed, to make deliberate use of the Israeli template to create themes of loss, the redemptive power of love, the immutable scars of history and the consoling effect of humor that resonate well beyond the world of the kibbutz or the background of the Holocaust . . . To read [Grossman] is to understand that there is a world beyond the political, even in these re-tribalized times, one in which there is room for recognition, however incomplete and often painful, of who we are in our own eyes and in one another s. Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Reivew
 
A somber and affecting tale without recourse to undue melodrama or psychobabble. This delicately crafted novel, crisply translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, is a fitting tribute to his friend. Houman Barekat, The Sunday Times (London)

Another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you ll read this year . . . A book of secrets wrapped within secrets . . . It is a love story, a story about a family and their myriad individual tragedies. But it is also about the way that the personal can never be wholly separated from the political, about the lingering wounds of history, about how violence seeps into all the dark corners of a life. It is, in the end, about Israel.  . . . Immaculately translated by Jessica Cohen. Alex Preston, The Observer

Concisely devastating . . . A powerful retelling of a Jewish woman s extraordinary life . . . A story so emotionally, ideologically and morally complex that it takes all of Grossman s