Israel In Translation

Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from David Grossman's most recent novel, Falling Out of Time, which is partly a folk tale, partly a play, and partly a novel in verse. In the story, a man known as the "walking man" sets off in search of his dead son, pacing in ever-widening circles around his village and picking up other villagers who've lost their children along the way, like a Pied Piper of bereavement. "TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE: As they commingle, so two rivers flow into my confluence. I did not know, not this way, that life in all its fullness is lived only there, in borderland. It is as though I never yet have lived, as though all things  that happened to me never really were, until you— WALKING MAN: And he is dead. I understand, almost, the meaning of the sounds: The boy is dead. I recognize these words as holding truth. He is dead, he is dead. But his death, his death is not dead." Falling Out of Time can be said to be a strange sort of sequel to Grossman's previous book, To the End of the Land, whi