From Tito’s gulags to a kibbutz … this is a powerful retelling of a Jewish woman’s extraordinary life, and of a family’s emotional trauma, from the author of A Horse Walks into a Bar
Israeli author David Grossman’s concisely devastating novel was inspired by the life of Eva Panić Nahir, a Jewish woman from the former Yugoslavia who, having been imprisoned and tortured as a traitor in one of Tito’s gulags, came to Israel with her daughter, married a widower and created a politically and socially active life on a kibbutz. But that condensed biography barely scrapes the surface of a story so emotionally, ideologically and morally complex that it takes all of Grossman’s considerable skills to render.
He is not the first artist to attempt it; the Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš made a television series about Eva, and there was a documentary in 2003. But Grossman, who had a “profound friendship” with her for more than 20 years until her death in 2015, evidently felt that there was more to say, and has responded to Eva’s wish for her and her daughter Tiana’s story to be told once more. In doing so, he has demonstrated again that the novel – elastic, expansive, amenable to painful fragmentation – can provide a space for the most harrowing and resistant material.
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