A Horse Walks into a Booker Prize

STEVEN KRAWITZ

The book, one of Grossman’s least political novels, is a short, emotionally demanding masterpiece, set in a Netanya basement comedy club, over the course of one night.

The outline of the story is simple. A cross-section of Israelis come to be entertained by a well-known but long-past-his-prime comic, the self-styled Dovaleh G. In the audience, invited by Dovaleh, is a retired judge, Avisahi Lazar, who does not know why he has been invited.

Also present is Azulai Pinz, a midget who coincidentally lived in the same neighbourhood as Dovaleh, Mamilla in Jerusalem, when they were children. Dovaleh is a comedian of the most vulgar type; he is aggressive and his biting comedy takes shots at every taboo topic, from the Holocaust to the Palestinians. 

Only a Jew could tell the Dr Mengele jokes he does and get away with it.

During the course of the evening, Dovaleh keeps directing his show away from his well-practiced comedy shtick to the most personal stories of his family and life, upsetting many in the audience. Many people leave, which precipitates his tragic unravelling on the stage.

Grossman has the power to create a despicable protagonist whose very presence on the page fills the reader with at best, indifference and antipathy, but more realistically loathing. He then peels away his layers of aggression and crudeness to reveal a traumatised and damaged person we cannot help but sympathise with. 

During the course of the night Dovaleh is able to present his case to the judge he invited, and subject himself to a very strange but redemptive form of justice.

In an interview earlier this year, Grossman told the Jewish American author Nicole Krauss (author of The History of Love) that he had been working on the idea for this book for 24 years.

A Horse Walks Into A Bar started from the image of a young Israeli teen who is attending a youth army camp in the far south of Israel. He is called by a commander and told he has to attend a funeral, his first, in Jerusalem, but is not who told whose.

In the suffocating ride north, he suffers a trauma that gives definition to his life. Over the years, Grossman revisited this image but was not ready to write the novel until he thought of the least likely audience to hear the now middle-aged person’s pleas to be understood: an audience at a comedy club.

This short book is not an easy read. However, Grossman, a master of economy, manages to pack the novel with enough concentrated emotional charges that the reader is increasingly too emotionally invested in Dovaleh to put the book aside and leave him deserted on the stage, like so many in the audience do.

Instead we, together with Avishai the judge and Azulai the midget, are drawn in like voyeurs watching a man in self-destruct mode.

The comedy club setting is in truth a stroke of genius, allowing for a stark contrast between the flippant and the serious, using comedy, an art form that makes light of the serious, to shed light on a lifetime of pain.

Grossman creates a cringe-inducing crumbling of Dovelah’s façade, allowing his authentic self to break through. He sets the judge up, ironically, as a sympathetic witness, whose very act of listening and allowing for Dovaleh’s stories to be told, brings about the comedian’s redemption. 

When reading A Horse Walks Into A Bar, it is difficult to separate the character Dovaleh from the author David Grossman. Just as the comedian exposes himself to his audience, the author exposes himself to his readers. 

Grossman believes that as a writer he needs to do this. Through his work, he subjects himself and his writing to all possible criticism in a process that can be painful, but is ultimately creative and socially constructive. He calls this pain the tax he has to pay for the benefits of sharing his writing.

Grossman also believes that societies and nations can bury their true selves beneath mistakes and national narratives. A famous critic of the Netanyahu government, Grossman withdrew his name from the candidacy list of the Israel Prize for Literature, after Prime Minister Netanyahu tried to remove two judges from the judging panel, as he claimed they were anti-Zionist.

Grossman is the author of Yellow Wind, an influential collection of essays on the conditions of Palestinians living under Israeli rule which was published in 1987. He is feted by Israeli’s liberal, left-leaning cultural elite and in similar circles abroad.

Right-wing Israeli nationalists, however disown Grossman and fellow author Amos Oz, who was also short-listed for the International Man Booker for his recent novel, Judas.

Netanyahu himself took almost 24 hours to issue a terse mazaltov to Grossman, inspiring a headline in the local media: A Horse Walks Into a Controversy.

Grossman lives with his wife, child psychologist Michal Grossman in Mevasseret Zion on the outskirts of Jerusalem. His son Uri, a tank commander, was killed in the 2006 war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah. Grossman’s book Falling Out of Time, a modern Israeli classic, was inspired by this personal tragedy.

He also began dealing more directly with the Israeli Palestinian conflict in his novels, resulting in his masterpiece To the End of the Land.

Independent of one’s political stance, A Horse Walks Into A Bar is a worthy winner of the Man Booker International Prize, and in its own right a book that shows with compassion how a broken man can claw his way back to an ultimate redemption.