9 - Private pain and public remembrance in Israel

Summary

Even my loves are measured by wars:

I am saying this happened after the Second

World War. I'll never say

before the peace '45–'48 or during

the peace '56–'6107.

Yehuda Amichai

A budding Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, in the introduction to a 1968 booklet commemorating his cousin, fallen in the Six Day War, describes a meeting of friends and relatives during the ritual week of mourning:

Words. Commonplace words and unforgettable words. Tearful words. And also unspoken words … and between the words – silences. It is impossible, ineffable. We cannot explain. There were things, moments, deeds; yet we're unable to name them. There once was a boy in Jerusalem, we loved him, we still love him, we cannot let go of him. How little we can say about him. We remember moments, laughs, conversations. Beloved smithereens of never-to-return days.

They talk in confusion. Cutting into each other's words, repeating themselves. Dazed by the dazzling sword of death … Here, now, what can we say. Now there will be a commemorative booklet.

Oz takes us into an intimate, typically Israeli scene, a sort of vigil; a wake in which comrades-in-arms, friends, and family gather and recollect, tell stories, sing songs of praise and lamentation, one after another. Together they conspire somehow to keep the beloved man around a little longer, fixing him vividly in language, before memory fades. Oz depicts an act of remembrance, part of a process of coping with death, interlaced with a rehearsal of memory traces.