'We have to find ways to live here together': Why this Israeli author wrote an 'unheroic war diary'

Since October 7 and throughout the endless months of the tragedy of the Gaza War, "fiction writing has felt impossible," Israeli author Dror Mishani said on the Haaretz Podcast. "There are too many tragedies around us."

Mishani is Israel's premier writer of crime novels and a successful screenwriter. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for television in the U.S. and Europe.

"Before October 7, I was writing a crime novel. I'm trying to work on it again," Mishani said. "But the story and the characters are completely changed by the war, because I am. I'm still looking for the right ways to write fiction about what we're going through. As I've said, I'm still not quite sure it is possible."

For many years, Mishani made a clear separation between politics and his art. But since the war, he told podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer, confronting the topic "is the only form of engagement possible now – for writers, for scholars, for journalists. We have to stop this war. We have to figure out how to avoid the next catastrophe, and we have to find ways to live here together."

Throughout the first year of the war, Mishani published columns in Haaretz critical of the war. He also kept a diary of his experiences of wartime Israel, publishing the entries as a column in the European press. The result is his latest book "Unheroic War Diary," published in German, French, Spanish and Hebrew.

The reception of his war diary overseas, he says, has been positive, and thus far, he does not feel shunned by his readers in Europe. Along with criticism of Israel's war policies, he has felt "sympathy and identification" from fans abroad with the trauma Israel experienced on October 7.

"Maybe this is because I wrote this diary," he said. "I don't know what would have happened if I had gone there bringing my French or German or Spanish readers another detective novel – if they would have wanted to read it. Maybe they would be right."

"We are living in this divide," he says of the current stage of the war for Israelis. "On one hand, life is apparently normal: We watch TV, go to restaurants, we live our lives while we know that something is deeply, terribly wrong with what our country is doing in our name just a few kilometers from us. I don't know what the consequences of that will be. I know that a lot of people have decided to leave the country because that divide was too much, and they just chose normality."

For now, he said, "I have chosen to give up normality."

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