The Bitter Taste of Dreams Come True

What do you think of the Iranian threat?
I'm afraid that in 10 or 15 years from now every country that wants it will have the means of mass destruction, so the campaign against Iran is a lost case. I am personally more nervous about Pakistan than I am about Iran. Pakistan is a nuclear state with a very powerful Islamic movement, so I am more nervous about Pakistan than I am about Iran.

Do you have literary favorites?
I don't have a shelf with beloved masterpieces, but Anton Chekhov is very close to my heart, perhaps the closest. He makes me laugh and cry, sometimes he makes me laugh and cry at the same time, which is what I tried to do in "A Tale of Love and Darkness": to erase the line between tragedy and comedy. I no longer believe that tragedy and comedy are two different planets. They are just two different windows from which we can view the same landscape of our lives.

How do you plan your books?
I don't plan them. It's sudden. I hear some voices inside my head, voices of characters, voices of people. I don't know who those people are, but they talk inside my head, and I don't recognize those voices initially. Eventually, if they stay with me for long enough I become familiar with them. And gradually the voices become characters, and what they do to each other is the plot. But it always begins with an assembly of voices.

Your mother committed suicide when you were a child. Do you ever hear her voice?
Sometimes, yes. I very often hear the voices of dead people. Dead people are very important to me.

What if a person doesn't want to hear the voices of dead people?
Not hearing those voices is missing part of yourself, part of your life. When I wrote "A Tale of Love and Darkness" I was inviting the dead to my home for coffee. I said to them, "Sit down. Let's have a cup of coffee and talk. When you were alive we didn't talk much. We talked about politics and current affairs, but we didn't talk about things that matter … And after the talk and the coffee you'll go away. You're not staying to live in my home. But you are invited to drop by from time to time for a cup of coffee." This in my view is the right way to treat the dead.

You wrote that as a child you wanted to grow up to be a book. Is a book more enduring than a person?
It was a matter of personal safety. I was afraid. I was a terrified little child. Rumors were beginning to come to Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1940's about the mass murder of the Jews in Europe. The air was full of premonitions about the same destiny awaiting the Jews of Jerusalem. I thought it would be safer to grow up and become a book than to become a man, because as a book at least a copy of me would survive in some far-away library in some far-away country.

© 2008