Author Maxim Biller is quick to make clear that there are similarities between the protagonists of "Six Suitcases," his new book, and his own family, but adds that he makes sure to walk carefully between the world of imagination and reality.
"Even if it's not right to compare me to him, so it sometimes happens in Philip Roth's novels," says Biller, "the names and surnames of the characters are real, but the characters get a life of their own as imaginative. "That's why I took this measure."
Not everyone has been satisfied in the past with this literary medium of Biller.
When the novel "Asra" was about to be published in 2003, his ex-girlfriend and her mother approached the courts, claiming to have identified themselves in the book and complaining that the author had based the female characters on them without their permission.
The court complied with their demand to ban the distribution of the novel, and since then the ban has been in force in Germany, although this has not prevented the appearance of translations in other languages, including Hebrew.
"It is unbelievable that in 21st century Europe a book was banned from publication, it is a scandal!", Comments Biller, not forgetting to mention that this is not the only scandal associated with him and his literary way.
The mystery aura of "Six Suitcases" - recently published in Hebrew translation (Zmora Publishing, from German: Noa Kol) - thickens around a mystery of the past: the younger generation in a family of Jewish dissidents, whose roots are in the USSR and former Czechoslovakia, The secret police unleashed a disaster on them, or even some disasters. As the "suitcases" open, receptacles of vague memories of six members of the family, the picture only gets more complicated. Does not let go.
Was there a betrayal at all?
Is it possible to judge people who lived in a different world, saturated with threats, circumstances and fears that no one will understand now?
You will not get the answers to these questions even when you finish reading the last words of the novel.
Biller likes to instill in his readers questions, arouse their doubts, quarrel, expose disputes and sometimes anger them, and even enjoy it.
Responding is not one of his duties.
"It's not pleasant for them"
Biller's life trajectory has always been unconventional.
He was born in Prague in 1960 to Jewish parents who moved to the city from the USSR. About a decade later, after the "Prague Spring" was severely suppressed by Soviet tanks, his family managed to escape to West Germany. And the grotesque emerges from the sorcerer of a world of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals from the present and the past, with many identities like him, and oscillating like him between countries and cultures in an endless search for themselves.
Biller very much enjoys describing the intellectual environment he had a home in - a unique combination of Jewish identity, a strong Russian intellectual tradition and a penchant for Western freedom values - and admits that it is an extinct world.
"After 1990, other Jews appeared here in Germany," he recalled of the dramatic events of the fall of the Communist bloc.
"Germany then invited the Soviet Jews to come through its gates, and until now I do not understand what it was - perhaps the attempt to silence the German conscience or some political idea. The new Jewish immigrants were no longer among the intellectual elite, even if they were educated people. They did not come to realize an ideal. Freedom but came simply because they were invited and expected to win all the favors of the West without effort.
"My parents came to West Germany with two children, without knowing the language - if one does not take into account the closeness between Yiddish, which my father heard as a child, and German - and without any property, except for a few icons purchased in advance to sell them in a new country. "12 to 14 hours a day, and he managed to get us on our feet, allow us to learn and develop. He realized the American dream, only in a European way."
The fall of the Berlin Wall // Photo: Reuters,
According to him, not only the Jewish environment has undergone significant change.
Germany itself has also changed greatly: "Official Germany, with its institutions and mainstream (excluding the Alternative for Germany party and the left hating Israel), ostensibly continues to speak in a familiar voice that does not shirk responsibility for the atrocities the Germans inflicted on Jews, and confirms the duty to remember and commitment to Israel. But in culture and literature there is no openness to people like me.The Germans refuse to see me as a German writer.
"It is easier for German readers and critics to understand a mediocre German writer than it is for me. The world I sketch is a foreign world to them, and most of all they see me as a foreign plant. My humor, my temperament, even my writing method, Between the opening, the entanglement of the plot, the turning point, the climax and the end - all of these are foreign to them, in an unsolved riddle.
"In addition, I often criticize them, also from the Jewish point of view.
It's not pleasant to them, and they do not hide it.
Obviously the Germans would have preferred that a writer like me simply did not exist.
"On the other hand, my circle of readers is still growing more and more, so I find it worthwhile to continue to struggle - to sit down every day, for 35 years, and write a page every day - even though the struggle is tiring and requires strong nerves."
Without rounding corners
He continues to write, but in Germany they will be surprised to hear that something is tiring Biller, and that after 35 years of formulating uncompromising positions - he is some of what he defines as "caressing".
"Lately I feel a bit like Don Quixote or like Sisyphus, or maybe as a hybrid of both," he admits bitterly, but immediately makes it clear that he can also tweet next time about the Germans' criticism and reluctance towards him.
Had he contented himself with literary writing, the image of the "bad boy" would probably have been spared from Biller, or at least not grown to monstrous proportions.
But he also sought to express himself in publicist writing, and instead of moving away from controversy or rounding corners - he actually sought to shout his truth in full voice and sharpness.
The regular column in Tempo magazine, which has been published for years, since he was 25, under the heading "100 Lines of Hate," has been a household name in Germany.
Readers waited anxiously for the column, guessing who Biller's foam would come out next time.
"Each month I chose a different target for criticism, but the headline was exaggerated," Biller explains.
"The content reflected aggressive but reasoned criticism, not hatred. In Germany, the combination of biting publicist writing and literary writing was perceived as exceptional."
The long list of high-profile figures who starred in Biller's lists almost everyone who inhabited the ranks of German and European politics at the time: presidents, prime ministers and ministers, along with icons of world culture.
Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was called a "liar" for his part in the Yugoslav wars.
Woody Allen was criticized for believing that his work did not rise to a reasonable level of quality.
The polite Angela Merkel asked three times to interrupt the interview he had with her, because she felt very unpleasant during it.
Angela Merkel // Photo: EPI,
"I asked her about the years she grew up in communist East Germany," Biller explains the chancellor's uneasiness, which is not a problem for her class.
"Although she did not build a career as a communist activist, I wanted to understand what she took with her from this era, what stuck with her and remains to this day, and she did not like it."
After getting tired of writing columns, Biller got his hands on writing long essays on the topics of history, culture and literature, in a reputed newspaper "De Zeit".
One of his latest essays came out against pseudo-historians who deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust of the Jewish people and try to present it as one of many crimes in world history.
To him, this is a kind of Holocaust denial.
"My article caused a great deal of controversy, and it was just a matter of spreading this dangerous attitude in the German public," he says with satisfaction.
"It is still buzzing in narrow circles of the left in academia, but in the mainstream we, myself and others, have managed to uproot it."
Biller's other essays were devoted to seemingly literary issues, and yet caused uproar, especially when he gave free rein to his unflattering views on literature in his country.
He does not hide these views even now.
"German literature is written for critics and not for a normal reader," declares Biller.
"I do not demand that everyone write like Dostoevsky or Babel, but bring the reader an interest!"
Different types of Jews
The interest that Biller himself was able to provide to readers of his novels and stories could certainly suffice for quite a few writers. He is sorry that in addition to "Six Suitcases" only two of his other books were published in Hebrew ("Asra" in question and the story file "Bruno Schultz's Head"), and dreams that the novel "Bat", which deals with the tragedy of a former Israeli soldier, carries a scar from wartime The first Lebanon will be translated and published in Israel.
Despite the grievances about the disturbing lack of acceptance and his many struggles in Germany, Biller was shocked when asked if he felt comfortable living in this country. "Do you think I'm comfortable in Israel, alongside people with gentile humor?" "A person like me, and I would have a hard time adapting. In addition, I know Israel: I also had to struggle with it all the time, and I would get tired.".
The question of Israel as an alternative to Germany does not leave you indifferent.
"In general, the question of why I live in this or that country seems somewhat outdated to me. I still understand that we referred it to the camp survivors, but today it is out of place. Of course I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my parents had immigrated to Israel instead of settling in Germany. In Israel, however, the important question is not whether I would write, but what and how I would write. Nazism and Stalinism would have played a much smaller role in my writing.
"I really like the early stories of the Keret Challenge. I would not have written short stories like his, but I would probably have been interested in similar topics. One way or another, life has worked out the way it did. However, I have no doubt: I can be myself in Germany only thanks to "The existence of the State of Israel. My Chancellor is the Prime Minister of Israel, not Angela Merkel, no matter if I choose him or not. He will protect me if I need protection. To be a Jew and not to be a Zionist is very naive."
Will your generation know how to pass this understanding on to a new generation of young Jews in Europe?
"I was able to instill it in my daughter, and my feeling is that in the intellectual Judaism environment, of which I am a part, this perception is in the public domain. We will occasionally go to a synagogue, even if we do not understand the prayer text. There are, for example, descendants of the DPs who settled in Germany after the Holocaust.
The numerically larger group is the group of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, where anything is possible. "A year - someone stays a Jew, someone leaves and someone gets stronger and becomes a completely crazy Jew (laughs). There is nothing new under the sun."
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