Five years after Elias Canetti’s mother died, he started building a machine that would bring her back. He’d keep on building it for the rest of his life. The machine was a notebook, a huge compendium of thoughts and quotes and memories, big and dense enough to reaches a kind of critical mass where it can accurately simulate a human life. He called it ‘a weapon in my heart that will conquer death.’ For the machine to work, though, it needed everything. ‘I need to retrieve every word she ever said,’ he wrote. ‘I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the greatgrandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.’ I know that feeling. After my best friend died six years ago, I said something very similar. ‘Somewhere, everything that happened must be written down for eternity. There has to be a recording angel, there has to be a Book of Life, so that what has been doesn’t simply pass away. I felt the desperate urge to write it all. How once, in Prague, her shoes started falling apart and her feet started stinking, and she fixed it by stopping at a park bench to smear her toes in toothpaste. All this needed to be indexed, every living detail.’ Human life needs to be copied over into a medium less fragile than itself. In the same notebook, decades later, Canetti wrote about the ‘enormous stock of memories and habits, deferred questions, frozen answers, thoughts, emotions, tender feelings’ that we build up over the course of a life. How absurd for it all to just vanish when we die. ‘The disproportionate size of this pile—and all of it for nothing?’ He would preserve his pile. He would live in his pile when he was finished living in his body. Thousands of pages. He called it The Book Against Death.
But that year, the year he really started working in earnest on his immortality device, the year he decided to ‘record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan,’ was 1942. While he was trying to drag his mother backwards out of her grave, a lot of people were busy dying. Millions of nice, bookish European Jews like Elias Canetti and his mother were being exterminated. In Leningrad they were eating grass and bark and eventually each other. In Singapore the Japanese occupation was rounding up Chinese men, driving them outside the city, and executing them in batches. Death had lost its individual, handmade charm; across the world, it was being mass-produced, uniform and identical for every customer. It was happening on the population level now. And Canetti does write about the war, the bombers ‘shimmering in the sun like flowers, like fish, after they have levelled entire cities.’ But not as much as he writes about his mother. Doesn't it feel a bit like cruelty, to care so much about one person when there are so many others being violently exterminated, all around you, right now? Even if it is your family?
I say all this because I’m writing from Tel Aviv. I’m here for a funeral. Jewish funerals happen quick: the point is to overwhelm you with practicalities, small chores and details, so you hardly have any time to wallow in your grief. It’s a very practical religion. I got the bad news on Tuesday morning; that afternoon I was already on an El Al flight from London Luton to Ben Gurion, wedged into my seat by the black-hatted frummer next to me. The frummer billowed magnificently over the armrest. The outer extremities of the frummer were constantly wobbling and roiling as he squinted at the comically tiny Hebrew letters in his comically tiny little book. Not a siddur: some special, advanced prayer book known only to to the blackest-hatted of frummers. When the stewardess arrived with his special kosher meal he studied the hechsher with similar intensity and then refused to touch it. Not kosher enough. On my other side was a blonde girl with immaculately painted nails and a sparkly scrunchie around her wrist. She’d overheard me back at the airport, ranting about Israelis. The gate had been full of Israelis, big crude meaty Israelis with big crude Israeli faces, barging in front of each other, talking too loud, clinking their carrier bags full of duty-free whisky. There were several reasons I wasn’t feeling great, and it all came out down the phone. I thought I was speaking—muttering, really—in a quiet, unobtrusive voice. ‘Never mind the politics,’ I said, ‘forget the war, the atrocities, whatever, these are just not good people. They are nasty people. Rude, pushy, bossy, petty, ugly people. Look at the way they drive. You can extrapolate the entire history of Israel from their behaviour on the road. They just do not care about anyone else. Fuck you, out of my way. Ma ichpat li, why should I care: that's their national motto. They’ve managed to combine all the negative traits of Jews and Arabs, with none of the positives. Jews without intellect. Arabs without hospitality. And those horrible fucking space alien names they all have. Gorev Eshlit. Dvor Magog. What sort of name is that for a Jew?’
And so on. I might have thought I was being quiet, but I was born here; I guess I’m also a loud, rude, tactless Israeli. So about half an hour into the flight, the blonde girl suddenly turned to me and asked if I was a reporter. I’ve done some stuff that might plausibly count as reporting, but since I wasn’t really sure where this was going I said no. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I just thought you might be because I heard you talking in the airport, and I didn't understand why you're going to Israel if you hate Israel so much.’ That was a little mortifying. ‘Sometimes I get carried away,’ I said, ‘I don’t always mean everything I say.’ But she still wanted to know why I was going to Israel if I wasn’t a reporter, so I told her. Now she looked mortified. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s ok,’ I said. I asked why she was going. She said her cousin had been shot. ‘In Gaza?’ I said. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘in Gaza.’ He was in a military hospital. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s ok,’ she said.
My uncle wasn’t shot in Gaza. He died in hospital after two consecutive heart attacks while being treated for stomach cancer. When Dave was first diagnosed with the cancer, the outlook wasn’t good. Stage four. Maybe six months to a year. That was eight years ago. He was there at his eldest son’s wedding. He wrote. He made music. Eight years in the sunshine: he was very lucky. If you can call it luck.
Still, it felt bad, coming here, and not just because of all the ordinary reasons, grief and loss. A funeral is one thing—but while I’m here I also have to eat, and the afternoons are hot, and you can’t just sit grieving all day, so coming here also means walking along the seafront, and reading a book in the shade, and maybe taking a nice swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, thirty-five miles away in Gaza, just down the coast, this same country is subjecting millions of people to famine, torture, and death. Down there, fathers cradle the headless corpses of their children. Skin melted off human bodies. Mass graves under the hospitals. What’s happening there is very plausibly a genocide, and it's happening about as far from the nice beaches and shady streets of Tel Aviv as Luton Airport is from my home in London. There’s a very persuasive argument that I simply should not have come here. Call it moral hygiene. My being in Israel might not change anything either way, but I still have a duty not to sunbathe outside the charnel house. If you have any respect at all for the people of Gaza, you should not spend any amount of time in this creepy Zone of Interest-style ethical nightmare, where sunflowers grow in orderly lines just outside the scene of what might be the worst crime of the twenty-first century. I knew all of this. It didn’t make me pause for even an instant. As soon as I heard the news, I knew I had to go. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s indefensible; it doesn’t matter. My father had lost his only brother. This was my family.