It has become nearly impossible to separate David Grossman’s latest novel, recently translated into English as To the End of the Land, from the powerful and tragic events that accompanied its publication. By now, the facts are well known: Grossman had nearly completed a draft of the novel in 2006 when his son, Uri, was killed in the final hours of the second Lebanon war. Grossman writes that when he began the novel, in 2003, Uri was in the final months of his army service. And while he worked on the novel, Grossman describes “the feeling – or rather, a wish – that the book I was writing would protect him.” Hauntingly, the novel is about a woman, Ora, whose younger son Ofer has just volunteered for another month of active duty in the army in order to serve in an operation at the beginning of the second Intifada. Beset by tragic premonitions, Ora decides that if she is not home to receive news of her son’s death, then it won’t happen.

She sets out on the hike she had planned with her son, dragging along her estranged lover Avram, and the two of them walk the Israel trail from the Lebanon border back towards her home in Jerusalem (the trail in fact reaches all the way to the southern border in Eilat). Ora’s determination to reconstruct her child’s entire life, narrated to Avram over the days of walking, seems both a magical effort to protect Ofer but also an act of memorialization. Grossman writes in an epilogue to the novel that after the shiva, the seven days of mourning, for his son, he made the wrenching decision to return to the novel, a decision he describes elsewhere as an act of “choosing life.” He writes, “Most of it was already written. What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written.”

Grossman’s tragedy is made even more nationally resonant by the fact that for years he has been a leading voice on the Israeli left. He became equally well known for his literary masterpiece about the child of Holocaust survivors, See Under: Love (1986), as for his work of journalistic nonfiction The Yellow Wind (1987), in which Israelis for the first time read Palestinian voices describing the experience of living under occupation. Only days before his son’s death he urged the Israeli government to end the Lebanon operation, which he had initially supported. He considers himself a critical patriot: his children all served in the army, as he did. At the same time, every week he is among the hundreds of demonstrators protesting Jewish settlement in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. To the End of the Land thus describes life experienced under the constant pressure of what the novel and Israelis call the “Situation.” Through Ora’s narrative, the novel lays bare the unbearable contradiction in the collective Jewish-Israeli psyche, between the terror of annihilation and Israel’s current reality as an occupying power responsible for another people’s suffering.

Grossman is well known for his ability to write about children and teenagers in such novels as See Under: Love, The Book of Intimate Grammar, and Someone to Run With. His last novels before To the End of the Land, however, dealt with complex erotic relationships between adults. This novel’s epic reach chronicles the arc from adolescence, to adulthood, to parenthood, and back to childhood and adolescence. Ora and Avram meet as 16-year-olds at the novel’s opening. They lie, feverish and isolated, in a nearly abandoned Tel Aviv hospital during the 1967 war, unsure if the world outside the hospital walls still exists. Ilan, another teenager, shares Avram’s room but is the sickest of all three, floating in and out of consciousness. This is the beginning of the passionate and complicated bond between the three children. Ilan, taciturn and beautiful, and Avram, loquacious and ugly, are both in love with Ora but also, after a fashion, with one another; she becomes lover to both of them but eventually marries Ilan.

Six years after they first meet, Ilan and Avram both serve as intelligence officers in the Sinai during the Yom Kippur war. Avram is captured by Egyptian forces and is subjected to unspeakable, horrific torture for six weeks before he is returned to Israel in a prisoner exchange. Avram’s difficult physical rehabilitation becomes Ilan and Ora’s central preoccupation, even as they have a child together. All of this weighty history is revealed gradually, obliquely, through Ora’s spontaneous, improvisational, nonlinear narrative. It is not until the end of the novel, for instance, that we learn the excruciating details of Avram’s capture and Ilan’s desperate attempts to locate and rescue him. And then, as we eventually learn, Ilan and Ora separate for a while, and her second son, Ofer, is in fact Avram’s child, whom he has refused to meet or know for twenty-one years, while Ilan raised him as his own out of love for both Avram and Ora. Ora’s determination during their several weeks-long hike for Avram to learn about Ofer is thus also for Avram, one more effort to connect this broken man to life.

But it is also Ora who comes to life as she realizes her new power as a maker of language, which had always been the province of Avram, the ambitious would-be writer, and Ilan, his eager protégé. While Avram and Ilan had made the discussion and creation of literature the field for their fertile, fervid language play, Ora’s space is the domestic and familial. She describes the small daily tragedies and triumphs of motherhood, the delicate and shifting allegiances of siblings and spouses, the parental joy and mourning that accompany the transformation of infants into children and then young men, lost to their mothers forever when the army takes them and, as Ora says, “nationalizes” them. Ora, it turns out, is now estranged from her husband and elder son, who have accused Ora of not adequately defending Ofer when his unit is implicated in the abuse of an elderly Palestinian man in the Territories. Ora is deeply skeptical of the army and of the masculine posturing it encourages, but she is no activist, either, and the extended sequence in the novel where she unthinkingly and cruelly hires Ilan’s longtime employee, a Palestinian-Israeli taxi driver, to take Ofer to his base where he will await deployment to the Territories, reveals Ora’s denials and fantasies about the “Situation.”

Thus the domestic and private are inextricably entwined with the national and political, from which there is no respite, no escape. Ora and Avram have gone “off the grid,” so to speak, but in Israel this seems well-nigh impossible. Even in “Nature,” Avram and Ora encounter groups of tourists, other hikers, Arab shepherds, guard towers, highways, garbage, battle sites, and most insistently and poignantly, the memorial plaques for fallen soldiers which are a familiar feature of Israel’s well-traveled trails and preserves. The land is scarred with lieux-de-memoire, and yet in Grossman’s telling the land is still beautiful, surprising, regenerating. It can also be desolate and even terrifying, as Ora and Avram encounter a pack of feral dogs and some wild boars.

The novel ends before Ora and Avram arrive in Jerusalem, and we never learn the fate of her son. Even as Ora and Avram are both overcome with a feeling of impending tragedy, the hike has enabled Avram to claim Ofer as his own, and through doing so “remember everything” that has happened to all of them. It is central to the novel’s twin themes of despair and rehabilitation that over the course of the hike Ora has managed to coax one of those feral dogs back to some semblance of domesticity. She feeds, waters, rubs, and talks to the dog, who then follows the couple on their trek. Is it at all possible then, the novel seems to ask again and again, to repair and redeem two societies locked in such a dehumanizing dance?