Hello
It's hardly surprising that Linda Grant speaks of herself as someone who is still not quite sure of her identity, because it's a theme that runs through her fiction. After our conversation on this month's programme about her book 'When I Lived in Modern Time's we were all clear that the question is still unresolved in her mind. I suspect it will always be like that. (Bookclub this Thursday 5 November at 4pm, and online too).
Linda has a sense of being caught in a demi-monde, with a Jewish identity but a British passport, happily at home in a country which will never be absolutely a natural home. This novel explores that feeling which, as Linda demonstrates, need not be a disturbing or draining one, but rather a fact about your personality - a trait you have to accept. She's cheery enough about it; there's no breast-beating or self-pity involved at all. Indeed, this book is very funny, though it's set in a difficult and violent time, at the birth of the Israeli state in the late forties. Writing about that process is impossible, of course, without touching on feelings about the Middle East, and particularly the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, that divide so many people (whether or not they've ever set foot in the region). This novel - which I hadn't read before we chose it for Bookclub - is exhilarating because it manages to get to the heart of the confused feelings that are bound to accompany the invention of a state, especially one born in such circumstances. The central character, Evelyn, is caught up in the violence that attended the end of the British mandate in 1948 and she has to adopt a disguise.
She gets into Palestine as a Christian tourist, though she's from a Jewish family who came to London from Latvia at the beginning of the twentieth century, because entry permits for migrants are very few; and eventually she adopts a disguise (bleaching her hair) to pretend to be the wife of a British policeman, and in that capacity she informs on the British authorities to those who're fighting against them (led by he likes of Menachem Begin, later to be prime minister). Yet the book's strength lies in Linda's refusal to resort to stereotypes : there's one character who becomes an idealist Zionist who is, in private a terrible snob, for example (Mrs Linz, a German refugee). In many of her characters there's a mixture of highmindedness and humanity allied to less attractive characteristics. She never makes it easy.
In the recording Linda described her strong sense of a teeming mass of characters thrown together in the enterprise that was the fight for a Jewish state, among whom were plenty thieves and adulterers and well as saintly idealists. She's utterly determined not to whitewash the past with gloss paint…though she did tell us that she's pretty sure in her own mind that Israel in its infancy was more united that it is today.
I envy her, particularly, the time she spent in Tel Aviv, which I barely know. I've spent some time in Jerusalem over the years and have always found it a perplexing though invigorating city : its overwhelming historic weight is often undermined by the miserable politics that flows across the dividing line in the city and over to the West Bank of the Jordan just outside its walls. Jerusalem may be inspiring, but it's never comfortable. Tel Aviv in the early days, however, was a different matter. Linda was there for some time while she was writing the book, and she describes her sharp feelings at the atmosphere of the place even today - her shock at seeing Bauhaus architecture in the desert (the reason is obvious when you think about it - pre-war German refugees). And in the forties, when Jewish settlers were arriving with high ideals about a new homeland in the desert, it was a rumbustuous, pulsating place carrying with it the atmosphere of a transplanted European population but with much of the chaotic and alluring character of the old Arab cities of the region: Jaffa (Haifa) is not far away. The sense of place is strong in the novel, Evelyn seeming to exist in a place that makes here what she is.
Though she insisted to us that she wanted to avoid any polemic in the book (and has succeeded) Linda does feel very strongly that much of the idealism of those days - the commitment to a community that could live at peace - has been undermined, one way or another. I know myself that many people going to Israel for the first time find it difficult to reconcile their mixed feelings towards its history and the tangle of contemporary politics. For most people, it is not easy.
This is a book which won the Orange Prize in 2000 and it has real quality. It's not a meditation on Israel - even less on "the wandering Jew" - but it is about both. And Linda described very clearly how it feels to realize that the question of identity which is such an important, nagging part of her personality is one that may never be satisfactorily answered. It must simply be accepted as a fact. I hope you enjoy the programme.
Our December Bookclub, already recorded, will be a conversation with the great American writer John Irving, who'll be talking about A Prayer for Owen Meany, a book many think is his masterpiece. That's broadcast on December 6th and again on the 10th at the usual time, 4pm. The next authors on the list are Alexander McCall Smith (44 Scotland Street) and Clive James (Unreliable Memoirs).
You might also like to know that the next recording for which there are places available is a session with the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk on January 12th in which he'll be discussing his novel My Name is Red. Remember that you can let us know via the website if you'd like to apply to come to one of our recordings - and there you can download Bookclub on the books and authors podcast too.
Happy reading.
Jim
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