The Moral Lives of Israelis

Author Q&A

20 Writerly Questions for David Berlin


1. How would you summarize your book in one sentence?
The Moral Lives is a memoir about an elusive future which we Israelis are pursuing.
 
2. What inspired you to write this book?
The last words which my born in Israel father said before he died in a wan hospital near Tel Aviv were “take care of my little country”.  The book was my way of doing him the honour.
 
3. How long did it take you to write it?
Four years.
 
4. Where is your favourite place to write?
I write in a small room on the second floor of our home in the Annex. But I think while I walk and I walk everywhere and always.
 
5. Did you do much research?
I read everything I could get my hands on, travelled back and forth to the Middle East a dozen times: interviewed every political leader and thinker who would see me, drove all my friends and family crazy with questions that were driving me crazy.
 
6. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?
I should have liked to write Nietzsche’s Posthumous collection. I would have written it differently.
 
7. What’s the best piece of writing advice you have ever received?
Avoid talking to yourself; Chanel: pose a question to yourself and then wait till the answer begins forming. If that takes forever, then wait forever.
 
8. If you could talk to any writer living or dead who would it be, and what would you ask?
I would have loved to talk with both the British historian Tony Judt and with the American philosopher Richard Rorty.
 
9. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind?
No. My wife is a violinist and I try not to listen to her either.
 
10. Who is the first person to read your manuscript?
My wife, in part because she is absolutely not interested in anything I write. If I can somehow get her through the manuscript then, at the very least, I know I have created an interest rather than exploited one that someone else created.
 
11. Do you have a guilty pleasure read?
To read anything while I am writing is to feel the rub. But I wouldn’t give up reading my weekly New Yorker and New York Review of Books, even if it meant that I had no choice but to drown the guilt in gallons of expensive single malts.    

12. What are you reading right now?
At the cottage this last weekend I read Camus’ recently published The First Man and Richard Gwyn’s John A.
 
13. What was your favourite childhood book?
As a kid I read all the time. Early on I loved Norse and Greek Myths.  In my early teens I read Ian Fleming and J.D. Salinger, and Ken Kesey and then I got into the South Americans and the Russians and the New Journalists and and and.
 
14. Were you always interested in writing?
Yes. That, sex and music.
 
15.  What do you drink or eat while you write?
Almond butter. I eat lots of Almond butter.
 
16.  Typewriter, laptop, or pen & paper?
Typewriter? No longer. Laptop, pen and paper, sometimes chisel and stone.
 
17.  What did you do immediately after hearing that you were being published for the very first time?
I was very young and it was a poem that I more or less cribbed from Dylan Thomas.  I spent the next year hoping Thomas wouldn’t find out.  
 
18.  What was the most surprising fact you uncovered while writing your book?
One day I woke up and found out I wasn’t who I had always thought I was.  It was like Samsa waking up to find he had turned into a cockroach. That is what happens when you screw around inside. Luckily I threw a four and a three rather than cats eyes.
 
19.  If readers learn one thing from your book, what do you wish it to be?
That things with Israel are not as they seem – that for all the often crazy and heartless stuff we read about  - there is still something  far more serious going on there than is usually written about in our philosophies.   
 
20.  What is the best gift someone could give a writer?
A cheque.