Don’t worry – this is not a personal medical update – the life (or lives) and death (or deaths) are not mine. Indeed, on my health front, the voice seems well on the way to complete recovery of its own (vocal) accord. (Did you see what I did there?)

No, this week we will reflect on the lives and deaths of and surrounding three figures of great distinction in the Israeli world of letters. They are front and centre in my thoughts at the moment because Bernice and I have just indulged ourselves in what is becoming an annual ritual. Every August (although, of course, not in the recent non-year, 2020), the Israel National Library holds a documentary film festival – Docutext – whose focus, as the name suggests, is on the written word, (though not exclusively).

This year, we saw four films over two days. Out of kindness to both the National Library and the filmmakers, I shall not comment on one of the films we saw. Nevertheless, we reckon three jewels and one lemon out of four is an acceptable strike rate.

The pleasure of anticipation began a month or so ago, when we bought a package of 12 tickets, and then sat down to decide what to see. This was, of course, a complex exercise. We wanted to attend two events a day over three days, rather than having to go into Jerusalem on four or five consecutive days. We wanted the emphasis to be on Hebrew language films, since this is a good exercise in staving off…um…what do they call that disease where you lose your memory? In the end, we made our selection.

First up was a 2008 American documentary about poet, diarist, Zionist pioneer and SOE parachutist Hannah Senesh, coupled with a guided tour of the Library’s current exhibit of her archive. You can read an account of her brief, but heroic, life here. Unfortunately, we weren’t, in the end, able to attend that day, but we hope to catch at least the exhibit at a later date.

Our next choice was On This Happy Note (in Hebrew על החיים ועל המוות), a 2021 Israeli film directed by Tamar Tal Anati. Where to start explaining this film to anyone who hasn’t heard of Anat Gov?

She and her husband Gidi were at the heart of a new wave of Israeli satire, that found early expression in what began as an Educational TV series, Zehu Zeh. Gidi was one of the stars of, and Anat wrote for, and played small parts in some sketches in, the series. From there, Anat eventually developed as a playwright. She also developed as a very articulate peace activist in Israel.

All of her plays are simultaneously extremely witty and deeply serious; written in everyday language they nevertheless have a poetic rhythm; although quintessentially Israeli, they remain accessible to a universal audience. Above all, they are completely – often searingly – personal.

Bernice and I have been lucky enough to see four of her plays on stage, the last of which was Happy Ending (סוף טוב): slightly surrealistic and part musical comedy, the play accompanies an actress in her 40s to her first chemotherapy treatment, where she learns that her cancer is terminal, and, over the course of the play, decides how to act in the light of that news.

At the time of the play’s premiere, Anat Gov herself had just decided, at age 57, that she was no longer prepared to undergo treatment for the terminal colon cancer that had been diagnosed 4 years earlier. She died the following year.

In that last year, as she prepared for her death, she also decided that she wanted to leave a spiritual legacy, and so she invited her theatrical agent, Arik Kneller, to interview her on film. This edited interview is overlaid with relevant spoken extracts from her plays and occasional brief observations, some years after her death, from her widower, Gidi, and from her best friend and the director of many of her plays, Edna Mazya.

These contributions are poignant, and the extracts are entertaining and enlightening, but the backbone of the film is the clarity and eloquence and calmness, the warmth and acceptance, with which Gov describes her philosophy. Death, she argues, is the one certain thing in life; it is therefore ridiculous to be afraid of it. She expresses gratitude for what she has been able to do with her life, for those with whom she has been privileged to share it, and for being granted the opportunity to prepare for her death. She is entirely accepting of her death.

She was originally opposed to having any treatment for her cancer, but her family persuaded her otherwise. However, when, after a few years, she had reached the point where she felt she had prepared her friends and family for her death, she simply stopped treatment and waited to embrace death.

On screen, as throughout her life, Anat Gov smokes one cigarette after another. When the interviewer comments on this, Anat is delighted, and proud, to point out that her lungs are completely clear. (Mazya recalls that when she was discussing with Anat the wording for her death notices, Anat was insistent that they should read “Anat Gov has finally quit smoking.” In this instance, she was overruled, apparently.)

Having seen the film, Bernice and I both felt that its lessons about facing death, and the image of Gov’s radiant face, would stay with us for a long time.

That same evening, we watched The Fourth Window (החלון הרביעי), whose subject is the literary work (and not the considerable political actvitist writing and thinking) of Israel’s best known author worldwide, Amos Oz. The film was made after Oz’s death, and therefore draws on a lot of archive material.

The trouble with that is that Oz was, in many ways, an extremely private man. He was, of course, a much filmed and interviewed public figure, but in those interviews I feel he was always very much in control of what he was prepared to share with the interviewer and the camera.

Oz had a difficult childhood, as described in his masterful family saga and magical self-portrait, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He was the only child of intellectual immigrant parents. His mother committed suicide when Amos was 12, and, in a move that seemed to spurn his parents’ heritage, he left home aged 14, changed his surname, rejected both his family’s right-wing revisionism and their academic life by moving to a kibbutz, and, after school, worked on the kibbutz’s agricultural land.  His long-time friend and biographer, Nurit Gertz, wrote that he ‘spent his whole life with a black hole inside and nothing could fill it’.

In the search to reveal more of Oz than he was prepared to share, the film’s director, Yair Qedar, struck unexpected gold. In the course of researching the film, she gained access to the recordings Nurit Gertz made of the phone calls Oz initiated with her at the end of his life. Oz asked her to write his biography, and over many phone calls ‘told’ her what she should write.

The film is interspersed with extracts from these phone conversations (or rather, for the most part, monologues). In these extracts, Oz reveals a great deal of what matters most to him, and of how he feels he has been misrepresented. He reveals insecurities and irresolutions that he usually took great pains to keep from public gaze.

Most fascinating in the film is the interplay between the guarded and unguarded Oz, the man at the peak of his powers and in full control of his narrative, and the man in his late 70s weakened by the cancer that was killing him.

Reading back over the last 1200 words, I realise this is all a bit on the bleak side. I hope that the last film I am going to talk about will life your spirits, although even David Grossman’s story is, as you may know, touched by tragedy.

Grossman will, I hope, not object to being called Israel’s second world-renowned contemporary author. It’s not a competition, as Bernice keeps trying to get me to accept, but, if it were, this is how Oz and Grossman would square up:

Remember that Oz died aged 79, whereas Grossman is only 67, and is still very much writing.

Oz wrote far more books, and was translated into 45 languages, whereas Grossman has been translated into 35.

They both received the Israel Prize for Literature. Oz won the Goethe Prize from the city of Frankfurt, while Grossman won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Oz was named to the French Legion of Honour, whereas Grossman won the Man Booker International Prize. In total, Oz won 27 awards and ‘recognitions’ from 11 different countries, including 8 within Israel, and no fewer than 7 within Germany. Grossman has won 19 such awards from 7 countries, including 8 within Israel.

Perhaps more significantly, the graph of Oz’s career has been compared to a Bactrian camel’s back, with one hump near the beginning, with My Michael, and another closer to the end with A Tale of Love and Darkness, and a number of troughs between, in terms of literary merit.

Grossman, in contrast, seems to write novels of consistent merit. He also speaks, as, in fairness, does Oz, with extraordinary clarity. Indeed, of course, so does Anat Gov. Not every writer is as fluent a speaker as each of these three is.

The director of Grossman, Adi Arbel, revealed, in the post-screening Q&A session, that Grossman was a most reluctant subject. However, it seemed to me watching that, once he had agreed to be interviewed, he was prepared to open himself up completely, and the film is fascinating in the glimpses it offers of the writing process itself, and particularly in Grossman’s descriptions of the period when an idea for a book first presents itself, and of his relation to the book, which seems to have a life quite independent of him.

However, the highlight of the film for me was a curious (perhaps unique) working practice that Grossman follows. He clearly has a warm relationship with his by now regular team of translators. When he finished writing his latest novel, More than I Love My Life, he invited some dozen of his translators to Croatia, where the book is partly set.

There, over the course of a week, they sat at a circular table, Grossman read the entire text aloud in Hebrew, and the author and translators commented, questioned, probed, discussed. The warmth, pleasure, focus and intimacy of that closed circle were completely enchanting.

I have mentioned previously my reservations about many authors reading their own work. However, I suspect there is a room in heaven reserved for when David Grossman arrives, where he will give daily readings from his work for the delight of the locals.

In conclusion, I know how lucky Bernice and I are to be retired, and therefore to have the time to go to documentary film festivals. Not everyone is so fortunate.