"In the hierarchy of literature written here, I do not place myself in a very high place. If the literary canon is an inclusive name for masterpieces, for books that are opinion formers, objects of research and study, I do not see myself in the canon," says Mira Magen, one of Israel's most popular writers. , Behind which are bestsellers such as "Well-Locked Buttons," "Lying and Coming, Woman," "Butterflies in the Rain" and "Days Will Say, Anna."
"Canon is a structure that time creates. There are works that get a lot of media attention, but are not sure they will stand the test of time. As for me, the formal rank does not interest me, I am interested in my readers. I as a reader often have strong doubts about these regularly, "I do not finish books. My desk is full of books I am in the middle of, with the bookmarks in them."
Are you sorry you're not in the canon?
"Maybe it's rather liberating."
But even a successful writer like Magen feels the changes in reading habits in Israel, and she says that the sales volume of her library has been greatly reduced.
"Unfortunately, the world of reading in Israel is in retreat. On the way here (the interview took place in the center of Tel Aviv; KD), I saw bus passengers from the window - and none of them was holding a book."
Why is this happening in Israel more than anywhere else in the world? On subways in the US and Europe, people are holding books
.
Reading requires lingering, thinking, going back.
I very much hope that there will be a regression, and a longing for something deeper, more deliberate, one that is not dragged after the events, will return. "
Requirement to belong
But in the love that Magen receives, especially in the national-religious sector, in which she also grew up, there is also a considerable degree of controversy.
"There are poignant statements about God in my books, and the erotica in them is not acceptable in the milieu to which I belong," she says.
"The house where I grew up in Kfar Saba was an Orthodox religious house, of Hapoel Mizrahi. I was an instructor at Bnei Akiva. The educational motto at my parents' house was' Wonderful of you do not demand. ' We are meant to understand. '
"If I had to place myself along the poles, heretical on the one hand and orthodox on the other, I would run all my life along this continuum. In my external lifestyles I keep Shabbat, and my husband wearing a kippah, is much more religious than I am. In the Friends of the Jahalin Association, and this Bedouin tribe, which is at the entrance to the cities of Jerusalem, I am very touched, and I also regularly contribute to the B'Tselem organization.
"In my first interview with Maariv, after the publication of my first book, I said that there was no difference between me and Jews, and we were all women born. After the interview, an acquaintance, a well-known educational figure in the religious community, called me and offered to call the newspaper I told him: But I said. He said: It can not be. He gave me a whole lecture on the phone that a Jew, compared to an Arab, would never raise a knife at anyone, and by chance that very week a Jew picked up a knife at his wife and murdered her, so I had a fresh example. "I am asked to stand with the camp, 'to the right of Taurus'. I am asked, when will you write to our public?"
And yet they call you.
"Readers, for sure. Sometimes I am even asked for the book in a brown bag or a white cover. Today the religious public is probably the sector that reads the most: not only because it is a public that trusts reading, but also because on Saturdays they read, and a lot. A large segment of my readers come from the settlements "I go to meetings, dress accordingly - I will not come in jeans - and say my opinions, without hiding. This ideology is wrong in my eyes, but I respect them internally."
The division over them also in faith.
"I have many reservations about the world of halakhah. I have a hard time with the concept of private providence, with the idea that there is some essence that looks at me and you in this moment and guards us and decides about us. It diminishes the sublime, gives us our qualities This grasshopper called humanity - as if God were a kind of great Goliath. "
But the question of how much we can understand the deity is internal to Judaism, not external to it.
"I have a rebellion against those who think they know and understand what God wants and knows. The question of the essence of divinity is sublime from man's understanding and he will never achieve it. It is a bit megalomaniacal on the part of man to think the cosmos revolves around him. "They say 'I do not go in there, I do not understand, I accept', they choose to put a limit to consciousness and consciousness. I do not put that limit. Randomness rules our lives, but if the world was created by a creator it also created randomness."
Randomness is the focus of Magen's new book, "Love First Hand" (Kinneret Zmora Dvir), which describes in a series of monologues the relationship between the occupants of a shared house, each of whom tells his point of view.
"A person walks, buys or rents an apartment, and completely randomly snatches into your life seven or eight other people who have to share the stairwell with you, and it is impossible to know where love, hate, friendship or alienation will be tied."
This also affects the structure of the book's action, because what drives the book is not the internal psychology of the characters but the connections between them.
"True, it is not the inner world that leads the characters but the connections between them. We move around with a sense of control, and in fact we have no control, the more I look I see how much randomness rules our lives."
The question of randomness is close to your questions about belief: how much man recognizes the outer core of control over his life.
"A person has free choice, but reality can frustrate his choices and skew his way in directions he did not think of. Here, why do these questions concern me and not others? If I were born in a completely secular home, it might not have occupied me at all."
The present book was born out of a crisis period in Magen's life.
"The book was for me an escape room from things that life happened in my way. I got to be in hospitals a lot during this time, and I found in writing a place where I could close a door on consciousness, the desk was a safe haven. The truth is I did not think the book would be published at all. "There was another arena that demanded quite a bit from me."
Death opened a window
Magen began writing as a child, but came to prose by chance.
"I would write songs, and I thought it would be part of it. At the Jerusalem school, workshops for writing poetry and prose were opened, and the meeting for registrants in both tracks was in the same hall. I came to the meeting, and saw someone I did not want to meet. It happened, completely random.Otherwise I would have gone to poetry and come out a completely mediocre poet.My poems have no literary value.
"In that prose workshop, which was led by David Schitz, my self-confidence aspired to zero. The exercise was to write how we started writing. I wrote a completely real scene from my life. My grandmother lived with us, she took care of us when we lived in Kfar Saba and my mother worked in Tel Aviv. Something from her, and she was lying on the bed and she did not answer me, and in the intuition of a seven-year-old girl something seemed wrong to me. She had big scissors and I threw them on the floor, so they would make noise.
"The next day was the funeral. They took me, I screamed terribly. I panicked. I woke up at Teacher Nella's house, she probably took me home. It was a week before Purim, about this time of year. Nella leaned on the floor and drew posters for Purim, and asked me wisely, 'want to help me?'
I did not want to. So she gave me a notebook: 'If you do not want to draw, write.' We went hand in hand to my parents' house, where seven were already sitting on my grandmother. "I was told, you have to write. That's where it came from."
Photography // Yehoshua Yosef,
But in the meantime, in the years when she was writing her first works, she worked as a nurse at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, and the phone call from Keter Publishing, which informed her that her first book had been published, arrived while from an infusion company at one of the hospitals.
"I think I was a good sister, better than I was a writer. Sometimes I sit and write a whole day and spend 500 words, and still not satisfied. The work itself was very technical, but you see the whole circle of a person's life. A few floors below you humans come to The world, and on your floor they come out of it. "
The hospital gave you proportions about the world of literature?
"Once, one of the brothers in our ward came out with a bottle of celebrity urine, and came to the nurses' station and told us, 'Look, yellow like ours.' "Is it important? We all came from the same place and go to the same place, and in the middle, if a reader writes to me that she found something in the book, then I did something."
Hold the paper
Magen says she does not read much Hebrew literature.
Among the Israeli writers, she mentions Sami Bardugo, Yuval Shimoni and Gabriela Avigor-Rotem, whom she admires, although their writing is far from her own, but in particular she reads non-contemporary translated literature.
"The question is whether you know how to aim the microscope and capture the subconscious. It does not matter if it concerns geographical or historical realities that are far from my life, the main thing is that it concerns the inner threads. The human soul is the same soul."
Do you not think that historical and cultural changes are changing the way we think and understand ourselves - and necessarily literature and reading as well?
"I will quote you from Marguerite Yorsnar, who wrote in 'Hadrian's Memoirs' that since the beginning of man's life the shape of his ankle and heel has remained fixed, but the shape of the sandal has not. Sometimes he is loose, sometimes he presses. I do not think that David's love for Batsheva is fundamentally different from love today - the conventions have changed, but not the essence. So today he will give her a note. "
note?
"A man who desires a woman, will see her in a cafe, and maybe tell the waiter, put my number ..."
I'm not sure a waiter would agree to do that. This is less acceptable.
"So technology serves us. I read Nietzsche's letters. He describes mobility between cities in Europe that demands a lot of energy from him. Today we cross Europe quickly. But what did it do to the psyche? I do not think it affected the inner core of the psyche."
But he writes letters!
"Look what we lost. Recently, following the evacuation of my parents' house, my sister discovered a bundle of letters from my mother, and found in them a rich, thinking and undecided emotional world. Writing forces us to formulate things for ourselves. .
"I'm not in the technological world. I read a lot, but not on the computer, I keep the books themselves, the papers. As a writer I used to get letters, and today I get WhatsApps. Although few readers, but there are readers who stuck with me. One woman wrote me WhatsApp and told me "That her 90-year-old mother read my book after she got sick in Corona and did not read anything for a year, and the book gave her back the joy of reading. When I hear that, I think I did mine."
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