See Under: Love

Name: See Under: Love
ISBN: 9780312420697

A Novel

David Grossman and Betsy Rosenberg, Translator

David Grossman's masterly fusing of vision, thought, and emotion make See Under: Love a luminously imaginative and profoundly affecting work.

In this powerful novel by one of Israel's most prominent writers, Momik, the only child of Holocaust survivors, grows up in the shadow of his parents' history. Determined to exorcise the Nazi "beast" from their shattered lives and prepare for a second holocaust he knows is coming, Momik increasingly shields himself from all feeling and attachment. But through the stories his great-uncle tells him—the same stories he told the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp—Momik, too, becomes "infected with humanity."

"A dazzling work of imagination." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“In a few nearly mythic books, such as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, Gabriel García Máquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, large visions of history get hold in innovative ways. See Under: LOVE may be a worthy successor to this small but awesome canon.” —Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

“A world-class work of fiction, one of the most profound, compelling, and ingenious novels that I have read in years.” —Tom LeClair, USA Today

About the Authors

David Grossman, born in Jerusalem in 1954, is one of Israel’s most widely read and translated writers. His fiction and nonfiction return to the questions at the heart of Jewish-Israeli life: the long shadow of the Holocaust, the fragility of family and memory, and the human cost of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His novel See Under: Love (1986) approaches the Shoah through the imaginative worlds of children and of the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. To the End of the Land (2008) follows an Israeli mother who sets out on a long walk through the country to avoid the news she fears about her soldier son. Alongside his novels, he has written The Yellow Wind (1987), a nonfiction account of life under occupation in the West Bank, and Sleeping on a Wire (1992), about Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Grossman’s work is shaped by his public role as an advocate for peace and a critic of violence on all sides, and by personal loss: his son Uri was killed in 2006 while serving in the Second Lebanon War, an experience that deepened Falling Out of Time (2011) and his later writing. His recognitions include the Emet Prize (2007), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2010), the Man Booker International Prize (2017) for A Horse Walks into a Bar, shared with translator Jessica Cohen, and the Israel Prize (2018). His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.