While I watched an interview with David Grossman and marvelled in his openness to others, to the world, I couldn’t help but wonder about Sally Rooney, the Irish writer who announced today that she would not allow her book to be translated into Hebrew.  Not that she has anything against the language she said, but she has to boycott Israel.  I don’t believe she is not as open to the world as David Grossman is, even though I haven’t read anything she has written.  But I find it hard to conceive of a writer being against a country – not its policies (which I too find impossible), but its existence.  And an Irish writer at that.  From the very country James Joyce represented in Ulysses!  The longing of Leopold Bloom for a homeland for the Jews was meant to be a model for the Irish in that book!

All right, so Linda and I mentioned this boycott to our book club, and the immediate response was:  Let’s read her book and invite her to speak on zoom!  And I thought – that’s the openness I admire in David Grossman.  The hunger to understand the other.