And if not?
We’ll manage. Hello, I’m here too, you know. And that’s the dream you’ve been talking about since we met. To write.
Okay. Should I run down to the kiosk and get you some more seeds?
Later, she said, and pointed to the bedroom.
Again? I sighed. As if I didn’t want to.
It’s not me, she said apologetically. It’s the hormones.
—
The list of things that attracted me to Dikla is very long. Among them are some small, seemingly unimportant things such as the smell of her shampoo or the fact that she knew by heart the plots of David Bowie music videos from the eighties. There were larger things as well, like the fact that she wasn’t a flirt and didn’t form opinions based on what she read in the weekend papers, and she looked away during extra-violent scenes in TV series.
But I think that the hidden element, what drew me most profoundly to her, was that she didn’t have a critical bone in her body. She accepted me and believed in me from the first moment. No undermining or attempts to fix me. She showed her love for me exactly the way her father showed his love for her at the family dinners in Ma’alot. With the warmth in his eyes whenever he looked at her. With the softness in his voice when he called her “my little girl.” With the eggplant-and-tahini salad he made especially for her. With the quiet but clear excitement for her every achievement, no matter how small.
That’s how Dikla loved me then. Without reservation.
It never occurred to me that, twenty years later, I would call her again and again from Madrid before boarding the connecting flight to Colombia, and she wouldn’t answer. How do you deal with criticism?
My parents are very critical people. Not to your face, of course. But they’re both academics, which means that they painstakingly examine everything taking place in their immediate radius in an effort to prove it fundamentally erroneous. For example, for years they’ve been coming to our place every Monday to babysit their grandchildren. Many things have changed during those years: Every time they arrive, they’re a bit more stooped. And they tend to get emotional much more often. My father has developed a chronic cough and my mother doesn’t hear very well anymore. Shira, the apple of their eye, has gone off to boarding school. And still, after every visit, they give us feedback. My father in a long text that includes clauses and subclauses; my mother in a phone conversation that begins in an empathetic tone and continues with a detailed description of all the mistakes we’re making as parents.
Take a look at yourself, I want to say. But don’t. Because I don’t want to be disrespectful. Because of the effort they make to come here every Monday.
In any case, when you grow up in that kind of environment, the need to criticize seeps into you, becomes part of you. It flows in your blood like another sort of cell: white blood cells, red blood cells, critical blood cells.
All that discouraged me for many years, and even now, sometimes flings me backward and downward (the movement is always backward and downward). But it also immunized me. After all, the harshest criticism is written in my mind even before the book is published. Now too, as I write, I take a potshot at myself: Are you crazy? Answering an Internet interview honestly? Now it’ll be available for years to anyone who googles you. Did you ever have writer’s block?
Are you kidding? I have writer’s block every morning. This whole interview—to confess the truth—is an attempt to deal with writer’s block in a different text. What is most challenging about writing?
The minute I start writing, I have an urge so strong that I can’t ignore it, the urge to eat. I go into the kitchen after every page. No, after every paragraph.
But that physical hunger is something I can deal with.
The real problem is a different kind of hunger. Your books are very Israeli. Don’t they lose something in translation?
I wish I knew. The truth is that I have no idea. At a dinner with my publishers in Turkey, for example, they told me that they had to cut several erotic scenes from the book because the Erdoğan regime had recently begun to harass publishers who weren’t careful enough. I sat there as if nothing had happened, nonchalantly ordered sütlaç for dessert, and thought: Who knows how many times this has been done, in other languages, in other countries, without anyone bothering to tell me.
Generally speaking, there is something fictitious in the whole business of translations. You go to a foreign country. They invite journalists to your hotel. It’s a two-star hotel, so there’s no lobby to speak of, just a small corner with an uncomfortable couch. You sit on that uncomfortable couch for three days. And are interviewed. Some of the journalists represent publications with names like Quinoa Chic, Unshaved Men, or Dogs and Sleds, and they seem a bit too friendly with the publisher’s PR woman. You can also see, or think you see, slight physical similarities between them and her, and you begin to suspect that these interviews have been prearranged: All the PR woman’s relatives have been recruited to give you the feeling that there’s enormous media interest in your book. Even though that week, in the country you’re visiting, a new book by Axel Wolff was published.
Your suspicion grows stronger when you suddenly realize—how did you not notice it before?—that even after years of work trips abroad, you have never actually seen someone reading a translated copy of your book. Not in cafés. Not in the subway. Not on trains. For years you walked through train cars, ostensibly to get the kinks out of your lower back but actually in the hope you would see someone, on the left or on the right, with your book. One reader would be enough to restore your confidence in the reality
