Hold on to the Sun

A Conversation Between Michal Govrin and Judith G. Miller

A converSAtion BetWeen MicHAl Govrin And JuditH G. Miller 2009 On coming to writing ... JM: i’d like to start by situating the stories and the essays in this collection within your work as an israeli writer. Here’s my quick summary of your trajectory:You began writing poetry as a child in the 1960s and you still do.You direct theater; you have published two novels; you’re writing a third; you’ve compiled the memoirs of your father and you’re writing about your mother . . . MG: And i have an unpublished first novel. JM: right! So where do your short stories fit within all this? MG: the short stories arrived before the novels, and they were my first venture into prose writing.they emerged from the poetry, but from the beginning i felt a very great urge to tell a story—to catch the world in prose. So as i didn’t yet feel like launching into a novel, the short stories imposed themselves, as much of my writing does. 233 JM:When was this? MG: in the late 60s.that’s when i started the first short story i ever wrote. it’s not in this collection and i wrote it as though a movie script. it was a fantastic love story. And i think it shows something about the nature of my vision, even then. i see the world as visual narratives, and i think that also explains my need for theater, because in theater i can really see the characters. they appear on stage, as it were. My three modes: poetry, prose fiction, and theater all date from the same time,and they stem from the great influences and the great ambitions i’ve felt since adolescence. JM: i know that coming back to this first collection of short stories has been an interesting voyage for you, because you wrote these stories in the 1970s and 1980s, and you hadn’t really reread them until this summer when we started seriously revisiting the original translations into english from the Hebrew. How has this plunge back into the stories affected you? MG:At first, i was very afraid of rereading them.Without your giving me a hand in this dante-esque descent into what seemed like who knows what, i wouldn’t have dared do it. i’ve been afraid that something from my old self would disturb me, that entering into the intimacy of the mind that created these stories would be a sacrilege, an attempt to deny time. But i must say that it’s been a very powerful experience. i’ve come to recognize and appreci234 A Conversation ate that young person who wrote them and i give tribute to what that person was at that time,that person who’s not me anymore. And then i also recognize my recurring themes, recurring needs,poetic needs—and i recognize the process. Suddenly to see life as a process, to see things that literally wrapped me up whole and that i took years to unravel . . . i now understand that what i theoretically believed about the power of adolescence is true. JM:You mean that in adolescence one’s deepest needs, one’s desires are already in place? MG: it’s a moment of big potential in a life story, of powerful urges and desire, of a vivid encounter with the world of experience and of culture, and the time when the individual personality emerges from a person’s heritage. cracks and openings occur in your psyche and if you know how to respect and listen to them, they’ll carry you all of your life. My departure from israel, my going to Paris in the early 70s answered both an unconscious and a conscious need to direct my life in a way that would allow me to listen to these voices, to these urges. otherwise, they may not have been granted the space they needed. JM: this harks back to when we first met in Paris in 1972. our work on these stories has also been a revelation to me, because in Paris we talked about ideas, we talked about theater; we went to the theater a lot together. We even did theater! But i was unaware of the kinds of things you were writing.You were very secretive about that. 235 A Conversation MG: Because i didn’t take my writing...