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Of life and art

Photo: Shanker Chakravarty

True to life Mira Magen, author from Israel, writes of the personal

Writing helped to restore Mira Magen’s belief in God. This acclaimed author from Israel was in the Capital recently for “Jerusalem on the Ganga — Indo-Israel Cultural Colloquium: Preserving Cultural Identities in the Modern World 221;. She is the author of four novels and one collection of short stories. Translated from Hebrew to French and German, she is acknowledged as a leading new wave writer in her country.

Her books tell of familiar persons in easily identifiable times. She deals more with the psychological than the political. The individual rather than the collective interests her. She elaborates, “The first generation writers of Israel served the cause of the state. Today the state is seen as something more normal. So, new generation writers are more interested in the voice of the individual with collective problems.” The scenario might be different, but the essence of emotion and experiences has remained unchanged. “The seed of the soul remains the same. Dealing with love in Israel or in India is the same thing,” she asserts.

Born into an Orthodox Christian family, writing helped Magen to reconcile her belief system with life’s travails. Working as a nurse at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, she saw how sickness pared down humans to their elemental being. Brought up and educated to believe that God conducted everything, she suddenly found herself questioning her own faith. With earnestness she says, “I felt if I wanted to keep my way of living I would have to leave the hospital. If I stayed in the hospital I would have to break my beliefs.” It was in this quagmire that writing came to her rescue. She started writing with no intention of publishing. Writing helped give her a sense of agency. “In the real world I’ve no control. In stories I decide who lives and how they live.”

This sense of power liberated her and helped her to continue with her work in the hospital. While seeing art as an antithesis of life, Magen also feels that literature and nursing are similar, as in both you enter the skin of the other — be it your character or patient.

She joined the hospital out of curiosity but in hindsight feels that it was the best decision she has taken. The hospital she found was a “microcosm of human experience”. Working with the terminally ill, she realised that that’s when human nature is fully exposed.

When her first book, “Well Buttoned up” appeared in 1994, dogmatic beliefs once again bared their fangs. Her publisher wrote an article about her, which appeared with her photograph. But her family then called him and asked him to destroy it. “A woman’s photo violates modesty,” she explains honestly, adding, “A woman’s place was always seen behind the stage and not on the stage.” Undeterred by the opposition, Magen went on to write three more books. Dogma might have unsettled her occasionally but her faith is resolute. The Bible is her greatest influence, she reveals.

On her first visit to India, Magen is still jostling with the enormity and contradictions that are India.

But what impresses her the most is, “the co-existence of so many religions with tolerance and the solidarity with the state.”

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