BIO

Ron Leshem is deputy director in charge of programming at Channel Two, Israel’s main commercial television network. Beaufort won the Sapir Prize --- Israel’s top literary award --- in 2006. The film version of Beaufort, which Leshem coauthored with director Joseph Cedar, won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Silver Bear for Best Director. Leshem lives in Tel Aviv and is at work on his second novel.

Back to top.   

AUTHOR TALK

February 1, 2008

Ron Leshem's award-winning debut novel, BEAUFORT --- recently translated into English from its original Hebrew --- is a coming-of-age war tale, written from the perspective of an Israeli soldier during the South Lebanon conflict. In this interview, Leshem explains why he chose to structure his narrative in the form of diary entries and describes the research he conducted in order to create an original voice completely unlike his own. He also talks about the experience of having the book adapted into film (which has been nominated for an Academy Award this year) and recalls his involvement and collaboration with its screenwriter and director, Joseph Cedar.

Question: The choice to structure this novel as a series of diary entries is interesting. What made you do this? Did this help you get into Liraz’s mind more easily?

Ron Leshem: It was clear to me from the very first moment that there was no way of writing BEAUFORT from the vantage point of an all-knowing storyteller. Such a point of view would have tainted the story with arrogance. I also did not want to hear my own voice there, in any way. It would have felt too compassionate, or too critical; it would have tainted things. The fun and excitement of the writing were in the very fact of my personal attempt to lose all consciousness, to erase everything I bring from my own home, to clear my head of everything inside me, and then leave myself as a green and hollow skeleton inside the tiny children’s state, this magic, tragic one, and be one of them. It is the apex of the writing journey; it is the experience. I wanted to bring myself to the point where I could talk and think and laugh and cry like another person, to dig into the soul of a hero who has an entirely different language from mine and entirely different thought patterns, and the most childish, macho point of view. I wanted a real and simple voice.

How do you do that? In the first stage, you gather the tools, the infrastructure: you spend dozens of hours in intimate conversation with warriors who served there, trying to peel them, and fill out whole notebooks with original language and similes and curses, thoughts and customs, superstitions, swaths of scenery and even psycho-erotic urges. You also collect dozens of home video recordings on which the soldiers documented themselves. In the next stage, you pour all of the foundations of this world into yourself and place “your new self’ on location. And you try to live.

During the writing itself you feel as though you’re in a trance, out of control, as if it were not you there, writing, but someone entirely different, and the text just flows out of your fingers into the keyboard, your heart beats with the rhythm of the scenes, you’re totally there. The next day you look at what you wrote and you don’t know where it came from.

And despite all this, there’s no way to prevent it: when I’m done, my voice is indeed right there, between the lines. It is partially very critical, in another part it envies them with a sort of sick feeling of having missed something that I did not get to experience. At the end of this journey, this is also the voice that gently channels the characters to the insights that this reality is supposed to highlight for any intelligent, sane, and sensitive person.

Q: What was the experience of seeing your story, BEAUFORT, come alive on screen in the film of the same name?

RL: A movie is, after all, a director's dictatorship. I had the privilege of working with one of the most important and talented Israeli directors ever to have emerged, Joseph Cedar. I was at his side as a scriptwriter, and also as a young intern looking in from the sidelines and trying to learn this fascinating profession from him. And indeed, I learned a great deal, and also expressed opinions. But in the final count, the Beaufort movie is his creation, and he deserves the credit.

Cedar and I approached the story with entirely different motivations. Cedar was born in New York, to an orthodox family. He grew up in Jerusalem, studied cinema at NYU, was a fighter-warrior in the Paratroopers Corps for many years and even served in Lebanon. I am, in fact, the exact opposite of him in every criterion. I grew up in a prestigious, secular neighborhood near Tel Aviv. I come from a family of Israeli-born old elite, among the founders of the state. I never served in a battlefield nor set foot in Lebanon.

The transition from book to movie is like sliding into a narrow funnel which forces you to focus, to choose one single line to be dealt with. Cedar chose to take from BEAUFORT the suffocating claustrophobia of the encampment, and to handle the banality of death. That is what the Beaufort movie deals with. With this selection he took different interpretations of the story, to the point that other than the basic skeleton of the plot line, he brought forth a new and entirely different creation, with its own bold and brave statement. It made me very happy to see the initial, private nucleus which I had created myself, in the loneliness of writing a book, suddenly become a venture which is worked on by hundreds of people. I was pleased to see a fresh and different point of view for the plot, with insights I did not bring forth. More than anything else, I was delighted that the characters that I loved writing, and which had, in many ways, died for me on the day that the book went to print and I stopped processing them suddenly become accessible again for processing, for handling. They gained faces, new lives, and I would sit for hours (and this time, not alone), and deliberate what to do with them and where to take them, trying to understand them.

© Copyright 2008, Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.

© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.

Back to top.