Books: A premier league player

Gerald Jacobs talks to David Grossman, the Israeli novelist with some controversial views about his country's history and future

On his 13th birthday, a Jewish boy traditionally becomes a man. He is then bar mitzvah - a "son of the commandment". The transition is usually marked by a ceremony in the synagogue in which the bar mitzvah chants - in a voice anything but manly - a portion of the law of Moses. At the subsequent party, amid lavish feasting and sentimental speechmaking, the new "man" and his friends generally indulge in a great deal of horseplay, as if engaged in a last defiant outpouring of childishness.

In the week before his bar mitzvah ceremony, Nonny Feuerberg, the eponymous "zigzag kid" of David Grossman's new novel, undergoes a rite of passage more spectacular than even the most extravagant banquet and certainly more instructive than the average rabbinical homily. In a compellingly drawn sequence of events, Nonny sails not close to but with the wind. As he gets sucked into the slipstream of mysterious creative forces, involving him in, among other things, the hijacking of a passenger train and the bulldozing of a building site, the boy makes some significant and poignant discoveries about himself and his family.

Nonny is the latest in a series of youthful protagonists employed by Grossman. There was Aron Kleinfeld, the stunted hero of The Book of Intimate Grammar, and before that Momik, the narrator of See Under: Love who, like Nonny, brings his childhood perspective to bear upon his adult psyche.

For David Grossman, this all reflects a desire to reintroduce adult readers to their childhood: "in our society today, where everything happens so rapidly, there is little time for the grace of childhood," he told me. "Adults constantly live with the defect of their childhood having congealed. Only occasionally - for instance, when we are in love - does this melt away. For me writing is a way of trying to redeem this loss."

In this respect, "The Zigzag Kid" is a gentle and entertaining warning against the dangers of conformism, of a too rigid adherence to the straight- and-narrow. And, although seemingly major crimes are committed, they serve the interests of a justice broader than that contained in the official rule-books. Its "ultimate criminal" - portrayed alongside the "ultimate detective" and the "ultimate actress" - is in fact a Robin Hood figure, endowed with that character's magical and magnetic qualities.

Not for the first time in Grossman's fiction, much of the action flows from the pointedly asked question: "Who am I?" When I pointedly asked the question about himself, the author replies that "the more I grow up" - a phrase fittingly identifying him with his young protagonists - "the more I realise that the question cannot be answered by one simple description. I try to acknowledge my own contradictions. Many people find it unbearable to coexist with all their internal contradictions. They try to live the easiest, most bearable life. A writer, an artist, tries for the opposite. He tries to formulate the soul's every nuance."

Now 43, David Grossman is well qualified to speak about the role of the writer. The international reception of See Under: Love (published here in 1990) propelled him into the novelists' world premier league. Furthermore, as a fellow Israeli premier player, Amos Oz, could testify, any writer who achieves celebrity status in Grossman's vibrant and volatile homeland is irresistibly drawn into the political arena.

Not that Grossman is reticent. In addition to four acclaimed novels and other pieces of fiction, he has produced two provocative accounts of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians (the theme indeed of his earliest novel, The Smile of the Lamb). The first of these, The Yellow Wind, in 1987, began as a commissioned series of articles to mark the 20th anniversary of the Six-Day War, which involved Grossman in spending a couple of weeks among Palestinians on the occupied West Bank. In the event, he went back and forth daily for seven weeks and the articles, which first appeared on Israel's Independence Day - "ruining the holiday for many Israelis" as Grossman recalls - became a book which sold four times as many copies in a week as the average Israeli book sells in a year.

At the time, he was working as a news anchorman on Israel Radio. "I became absorbed by this reality only half-an-hour's drive from my home in Jerusalem. Up to then, I had adapted reality to the language of occupation. But I was now shedding the cliches of the newsman. It was as if I was starting at last to breathe with both lungs."

He began in radio at the extraordinarily young age of nine - boyhood is never far away when speaking to David Grossman - when he was known as "the boy on the box". This was because, as the only child actor performing on the radio at that time, he had to stand on a box to reach the microphone. But drama was just the springboard and within a short time he was travelling around Israel, accompanied by his mother, conducting a series of interviews.

"I want someday to write about that period," he says now. "I grew up surrounded by adults. And not just any adults but actors, with all their stormy lives and relationships. It was quite an education."

His more formal education led to a degree in philosophy and theatre at Jerusalem University, followed by an MA in comparative literature, during which he decided upon a writing career, one which he has followed full- time since being sacked by Israel Radio nine years ago.

"It was the day after Arafat's national Palestinian conference in Algeria had declared for a Palestinian state to exist alongside Israel. This was placed down at number 12 in our news running order, and when I protested they said: 'Oh, you and your Arabs.' I said: 'No, this is about me and my Jews!' My protest became public; then my wife read in Ha'aretz newspaper that I had been fired. That's how we found out.

"I came back for another two or three programmes but they wanted me to apologise for my opinions. I did not apologise and that was that. Sacking me was the best thing they ever did for me. A writer cannot work within a system, particularly a government system as Israel Radio was then. It's different now. You hear more voices, more opinions."

In Israel's currently turbulent political climate, such conflicting voices create a cacophany, one that is likely to increase in volume as the state approaches its 50th anniversary celebrations next year. David Grossman, for one, does not feel jubilant: "For a week or two, everybody will be uplifted but we will really have something to celebrate only when this Promised Land of ours lives up to its promised-ness.

"With Yitzhak Rabin's assassination two years ago, something was broken in the contract, the covenant, that everyone has with his country. We saw suddenly very graphically that there were people here prepared to do anything to impose their point of view. To reject democracy.

"But I take comfort from the fact that half of the population did not vote for Netanyahu. The bungled attempt upon the life of Masha'al, the Hamas leader, in Jordan, was only one in a series of recent jolts to the self-image of the Israeli, from the failure to prevent Rabin being killed to the deaths of our soldiers in Lebanon. These are symptoms of a sickness that is personified by Netanyahu. A false confidence that says 'we can solve everything by force and vigour'. We are paying a heavy price for this.

"But I still believe that, for Jews, living in Israel is a privilege. I think of the 80 generations of Jews who could only dream of living in this state. I wouldn't trade it for the world. Also it is important for me to write in Hebrew - to hear all the echoes. The language is the national archive. All the qualities of a people are preserved in its language. And to hear my children playing and quarrelling in Hebrew - well, it's a miracle."

His children are Yonatan, 16, Uri, 12, and Ruth, 5. He has been married to his wife Michal for 23 years. They met through "the national matchmaker" - the army. And if military ubiquity is another fact of Israeli life, it is one whose necessity Grossman, active worker for peace that he is, readily accepts.

"Not everything is black and white," he says. "Israel is a complex society. Part of us believes we are living in Manhattan; part is stuck in a tribal war. But is there any other country whose enemies - Hamas, Iran, Iraq - are bent on that country's annihilation? We need to defend ourselves.

"The Israeli reality is ever-present in what I write - combined with the historical Jewish attitude. Language is where it comes together. The words are the important thing." Unsurprisingly, he works closely with his English - that is to say, American - translator, Betsy Rosenberg: "We discuss every word."

He is just completing his next novel, "a story about a man and a woman, both of whom are married to other people, who connect, obsessively, through words. They create for themselves a hermetic, private, verbal territory - which is another definition of love."

Grossman is a beautiful storyteller. And while he numbers Kafka and Boll among his influences, perhaps the most significant was his grandmother. "She was a spring of wisdom. She told stories and proverbs in Yiddish. She died at 93 but was a young person imprisoned inside an old one." Ah, that childhood echo again.

'The Zigzag Kid' is published by Bloomsbury at pounds 14.99