Israeli Author David Grossman
Set for Athenaeum Visit: Nov. 6

Writer and author David Grossman, one of Israel's preeminent novelists, will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday, Nov. 6 to discuss
"Israel at 60: Nation, Identity, and Literature." The public portion of the program begins at 6:45 p.m., with free seating on a first-come basis. A book signing in the Athenaeum lobby will follow Thursday's lecture.
Grossman has been called "one of contemporary literature's most versatile and absorbing writers," by the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle Book Review, and "a writer who has been, for nearly two decades, one of the most original and talented not only in his own country but anywhere," by The New York Times Book Review. His most recent book, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2008) is a collection of a half-dozen essays on politics and culture in Israel today, in which he addresses the conscience of a country that has lost faith in its leaders and its ideals. Included is an already famous speech concerning the disastrous Second Lebanon War of 2006 that took the life of Grossman's 20-year-old son, Uri.
"I am totally secular," Grossman said during a speech at the Yitzhak Rabin memorial in 2006. "And yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts a political, national, human miracle."
The author of numerous novels, short stories, essays, plays, and non-fiction and children's books, Grossman has, since the publication of his first story, Donkeys, in 1979, garnered many awards and honors for his masterfully wrought and singularly compelling prose. These include the Prime Minister's Prize for Creative Work (1984); the Chavalier de l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres (France); the Valumbrosa Prize, Premio Mondelo, and Vittorio de Sica Prize (Italy); the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation (United Kingdom), and the Har Zion Prize, Sapir Prize, and the Emet Prize for Arts, Science and Culture.
From his early works, Grossman has acknowledged a love for Yiddish literature and the works of Franz Kafka and Heinrich B?ll. His novels and non-fiction have dealt with all manner of themes: the Holocaust, Arab/Jewish relations, life on the West Bank (e.g., The Smile of the Lamb, 1983 later made into a film directed by Shimon Dotan; and his non-fiction The Yellow Wind, 1987)even, as in his 2000 novel, Someone to Run With, Jerusalem's vagrants, drug addicts, and runaways.
Grossman's visit to Claremont McKenna College is sponsored by The Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.