“I wish the
fighting will end soon. For the sake of all innocent people
– both Israelis and
Palestinians”
I am shocked. This is the first time I have ever interviewed someone
while their country is under attack by hundreds of terrorist missiles, and the
rest of the world remains silent because those missiles are only aiming at
killing Jews. Someone whose country is at war.
Yet, Nava never complained.
Not a single condemnation nor lament came out of her lips. She responded
cordially to my emails, without mentioning the terrible situation she was
living.
I never dared to ask how she
was until a missile fell in Tel Aviv, her hometown. And then Nava answered me
with the same strength and warmth from her previous emails (and that moved me
and made me admire her): “We’re fine. Thank you for your concern.”
Even when she told me,
because I asked her, that her son was called to the reserve the following day, she
did not condemn her aggressors: she was only thankful her son wouldn’t be at
the battlefront.
And I don’t know why I
imagined that after writing me those reassuring letters, almost always at
night, Nava would look for a quiet corner, barely place her forehead against
the wall, and turning her back to the war, a couple of tears would roll down
her face, silently, the only silence that the missiles soaring her sky let her:
an inner silence.
And it is night-time here as
I write; the sky is starry, the moon swells and frogs croak asking for rain as
the summer approaches and heat rises. Only a commercial flight soars the sky,
and it is just one during the whole night. It’s the countryside here. It’s
still and peaceful here.
And then I think about Nava’s
sky violated by hundreds of terrorist missiles. I think about Nava’s night
terrorized by the sound of sirens. I think about Nava’s stars desperate because
of the fire. I think about Nava’s moon hidden by fear. And I think about Nava,
who is all the women and men, and everyone’s childhood and youth, locked in an
air-raid shelter, with her eyes wide open, unable to sleep when death comes
falling from the sky, and I cry.
Nava Semel with her mother
Mimi Artzi who survived Auschwitz
"We had to become our parents' protectors against the
dangers of memory."
Nava, Jane Fonda was so shocked by your novel that
while reading it – journalist Daniel Weizmann tells –: “she looked at the
ceiling and with her characteristic, pleading voice she said: “How to tell the
story?”
How do you feel
about this acknowledgment? It’s Jane Fonda! How do you feel about the fact that
your novel was chosen to close this historic event?
I'm deeply moved and honored. I feel that a circle is finally closed. In
June 1980 Jane Fonda visited Israel
as a guest of the Haifa Theatre. She was invited to launch a theatre
educational program in a poor neighborhood. My husband Noam Semel was the
Director General of the Haifa Theatre at the time. He hosted Ms. Fonda during
her stay in Israel.
One day I was asked to accompany Ms. Fonda on a car ride from Tel Aviv to Haifa. I was young than
and very shy, so at first I refused, but my husband insisted. Along the way Ms.
Fonda began questioning me about the scar of the Holocaust in my family. It was
as if she somehow sensed it. She told me about her friend in LA whose
memories suddenly came back. Suddenly, my heart opened. I was overwhelmed
because I never spoke about my sad childhood and the term "Second
Generation" did not exist yet.
I opened up to Ms. Fonda as I never did
before, and for the first time in my life the words "I'm a daughter of a
Holocaust survivor", came out of my lips. This experience was so deep, 4
years later I wrote the story "One ride with Fonda". published
in 1985 in
my collection "Hat of Glass", the first Israeli book in prose to
address the issue of Second Generation.
I always felt that Jane Fonda found the
mysterious key to my hidden scar and helped me come out of my dark emotional
pit.
Now, twenty five years later our paths are crossing again.
Were you there?
I'm so sorry I missed this event. I had just come back from a 10 days
book tour in Italy
a few days earlier, so I was too exhausted and could not travel again.
What
were you doing in Italy?
And the Rat Laughed came out in January 2012, so I was invited to give guest
lecture at a conference in Milan
University. Since I
recently published a new book in Hebrew which takes place in Italy under Nazi occupation, I was also invited to talk about it in Torino. My last stop was the University
of Calabria in Southern
Italy where I participated in a two days conference on teaching
the Holocaust.
Which
story shocked both Jane Fonda and the audience the most?
Perhaps because And
the Rat Laughed is a unique book. Unlike other Holocaust-related
books that focus on the historical horrific events, this novel deals with the
act of remembering them. It resembles a relay race in which the characters
transfer memory from one another. The
novel got acclaim for its use of unconventional and original literary devices
and became a ground breaker for exploring the act of memory itself. I
wish I could listen to Jane Fonda's beautiful voice. Her special way in posing
the question on behalf of my protagonist: "How to tell this story?"
Does the story change
while we recall it? How will our next recipient recall it in their own
individual way? Is Art the only way
to transfer emotional memory?
I'm troubled by these
questions, seeking answers in my books. And the Rat Laughed deals with
the influence of the most horrific chapter of human history on man’s
relationship with God, on the understanding of human nature, on the need to
forget in order to survive, and on the need to remember, nonetheless.
The
character of your novel is a 5 year-old girl, victim of Nazis and of rape by a
catholic man. Is that a true story?
No. It is pure fiction. Although I always assumed that similar cases did
happen during those dark days.
The book begins on the last day of 1999, when a survivor grandmother in Tel Aviv shares her tragic life story as a
hidden child in a pit, with only a rat for company with her granddaughter. This
rat taught her how to laugh and kept her sanity. The day after – 2000
already – the granddaughter tells the legend of “Girl and Rat” to her teacher
and in 2009 those who heard it through her classmates establish an internet
website with poems. From now on this memory is spread all over the world and becomes
a famous myth. In 2099 the future anthropologist Y-Mee Prana tries to uncover its mysterious roots. In her
research, she reveals the first man who created this myth in the past. Father
Stanislaw, a Catholic priest, saved
that little Jewish girl (who later became the grandmother in Tel Aviv).
In his personal journal he documented everything, to make sure the world would
never forget. The chain of "remembearers",
therefore, moves from the present to the future and back to the past.
The novel is written in five genres: story, legend, poems, science fiction and diary, creating a cycle of 150 years.
When
and how was the story born?
This novel is the strangest and most profound experience in my entire
life. It took 2 years to actually write it, yet 10 years before the seeds were
already planted. While living in NY in 1989, I attended the first gathering of
hidden children. At first, they were the image of success and the SHOAH
couldn't be attached to them. Later, I detected a frozen child inside,
struggling with his memory and torn between a vicious dilemma. On one hand, he
yearns so much to remember, wanting to hold a thread of his lost identity. On
the other, he's too afraid to recall the most heart breaking moment of his
life: the separation from his parents.
When leaving the conference, walking on Park Avenue
on a beautiful fall afternoon, I heard a voice whispering in my head:
"someone must give voice to these "mute" children". I never
thought this someone would be me. For ten years I collected testimonies
of hidden children. They were very short, laconic, as if not only memory was
suppressed but their entire being is coded into short, formal sentences.
The last trigger for writing was my meeting with a survivor who shared
his memoire. During the conversation in a café in Tel Aviv on a winter night in
1998, the door opened and closed constantly and I've noticed his body jumped.
His face became that of a boy. He than told me how he is still waiting for his
mama to come and take him back, as she promised so many years ago.
The door banging started the book. I heard the grandma's voice in my
head.
What
happened in Israel
when the novel was published?
I feel blessed because the novel was enthusiastically
received by both the Israeli public and the critics. It even became a
best-seller. Later, it was adapted for the stage. I wrote the libretto-play
version for an opera, composed by Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff. It was performed by the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv and the Israeli Chamber Orchestra from 2005-2009. The opera represented Israel at the
Theatre Festivals in Warsaw Poland,
Sibiu in Romania and Bucharest National Theatre. In 2009
a new production in Hebrew, opened in Toronto Canada
by "Opera York".
Can we expect a
movie based on your book?
The film rights were bought by an Israeli film producer and I had just
finished writing the screen version. Making movies in Israel is a
long process because of the need of raising the necessary funds. Yet, I'm
hopeful.
You’re
a daughter of survivors. How do you feel when writing of the horrors the Nazis
inflicted upon people like your parents?
My mother, Mimi Artzi, who survived Auschwitz, didn’t talk about her horrific past. Even on
Holocaust Memorial Day she used to turn off the radio and television and
barricade herself behind walls of silence. The only story to leak was
about Clarissa, her Kapo in her last concentration camp in Germany, who
had saved her from certain death. Mom called her "my angel".
Years later, Clarissa inspired my book Hat
of Glass which was the first attempt in contemporary Israeli prose to
publicly discuss the issue of the second generation to Holocaust survivors. She
also inspired the character of Father Stanislaw the Catholic priest who saves a
Jewish girl in And the Rat Laughed, written 2 decades later.
The ‘pact of silence’ between surviving
parents and their children - “you don’t ask and we won’t tell”- was not
exclusively confined to my family. The survivors' private Holocaust had been
concealed in the deepest recesses of their souls, so that only the tip of the
iceberg continued to surface, through their nightmares or via the mundane
routine of Israeli life; a potato peel, a barking dog, a torn garment, a bare
foot, a school trip, a railway track, each and every marginal detail or random
event could unlock a spike of memory from behind the fragile defensive wall and
crush the house.
An entire generation of native born Israeli
kids got the same unspoken message. "You don't ask and I won't tell".
We had to become our parents' protectors against the dangers of memory. It was
our task to shield the survivors from suffering the trauma of remembrance. I
was part of it until I became a writer and the texts taught me differently.
Writing forced me to look straight into the very edge of the black pit.
“Perhaps all the stories have already been
told? say the sceptics." In my latest novel "Screwedon Backwards") Kinneret-Zmora- Bitan, Israel, 2012) again I wrote a Holocaust story. The novel focuses on an Italian Jewish musician who is rescued by his Christian
lover in a small village in Piedmont under
Nazi occupation. The text in the novel responds to all those skeptics: “Memory
must be monitored to its furthest edges so that it doesn’t ever fade
away".
Why
was your childhood sad?
There was always a shadow lingering above. Mine was a typical childhood
in a family of survivors. The parents were devoted to their children, making a
good and protected life for us, but there was no laughter. No Joi de Vivre as
the French term. I always felt there are ghosts in the house and was a very
fearful child.
(...)
Excerpt from the interview
