By Amos Oz . Acceptance Speech
Prince of Asturias Award Letters (2007).
If you purchase a ticket and travel to another country, you may see the mountains, palaces and plazas, museums, landscapes and historic sites. If fortune smiles, you might have a chance to talk with some locals. After coming home loaded with plenty of photographs and postcards.
But if you read a novel, you gain an entry into the most secret passages from another country and another people. Reading a novel is an invitation to visit the homes of others and know their most intimate rooms.
If you're just a tourist, you might have occasion to stop at a street, see an old house in the old quarter of the city and see a woman leaning out the window. Then you'll turn around and go your way.
But as a reader not only look at the woman gazing out the window, but you were with her in her bedroom, and even inside his head.
When you read a novel from another country, you are invited to go to other people living at the nursery, the office, and even the bedroom. You are invited to enter their secret sorrows, into their family joys, their dreams.
And I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I think that curiosity is, in fact, a dimension moral. I think the ability to imagine the neighbor is a way to immunize against fanaticism. The ability to imagine the others not only makes you a more successful businessman and a better lover, but also a human person.
Part of Arab-Jewish tragedy is the inability of many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other. To imagine really loves, the terrible fears, anger, instincts. Prevails among us too much animosity and too little curiosity.
Jews and Arabs have something in common: both have suffered in the past and violent under the heavy hand of Europe. The Arabs have been victims of imperialism, colonialism , exploitation and humiliation. The Jews have been victims of persecution, discrimination, exclusion and, ultimately, the murder of one third of the Jewish people.
would think that two victims, and especially two victims of the same oppressor, develop some solidarity between them. Unfortunately things are not so, or in novels or in real life. By contrast, some of the most terrible conflicts are those that occur between two victims of the same oppressor. The two children from a violent parent need not necessarily love. They are often reflected on each other the image of the cruel parent.
Exactly this is the situation between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East: the Arabs see Israelis to the new crusaders, the new reincarnation of the European colonial , many Israeli Arabs see the new incarnation of our pursuers the past: the perpetrators of pogroms and Nazis.
Europe This reality imposes a special responsibility in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict: instead of raising an accusing finger towards one or other of the parties, the Europeans should show affection and understanding and assist both parties. You do not have to continue to choose between being pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. Should be in favor of peace.
The woman in the window can be a Palestinian woman in Nablus and can be an Israeli woman Tel Aviv . If you want to help make peace between the two women in the two windows, they should read more about them. Read novels, dear friends, learn a lot.
Things would be better if they also each of these two women read about the other, to know, at least, what makes a woman the other window is afraid or angry, and what gives him hope.
I have not come this afternoon to say that reading books will change the world. What I have suggested is that I think reading books is one of the best ways to understand that ultimately, all women of all windows in dire need of peace.
I want to thank the jury members of the Prince of Asturias have given me this wonderful award. Thank you very much and best wishes to you all. Shalom u- bracha.
0 comments:
Post a Comment