The Other in David Grossman's Work in Light of Levinas’s Ethical Turn

The core theme of this volume is that, in his literary fiction, David Grossman has created a language that operates on two levels—the ethical and the poetic. This duality of levels contains an inherent tension between that which is expressible on a poetic level, whose boundaries are limitless, and the ethical, which is not definable. This book appeals to students and researchers. It examines, for the first time, the ethical aspect of Grossman’s literary fiction as inspired by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s thought also contains a tension between the ethical claim in everyday reality and the impossibility of defining ethics in language due to its transcendental origins. The comparison between Levinas and Grossman is based on the fact that, despite significant differences between them in terms of identity, both placed the ethical claim at the center of their work, and both grappled with the difficulty of defining this through indirect, albeit intentional, linguistic mechanisms. Lemberger argues that Grossman’s work reflects the existence and development of a rich, ethical language across diverse life circumstances and at different life stages—and that consequently, Grossman is responsible for the creation of an ethical turn in modern Hebrew literature.