Be My Knife (Hebrew: Mishehu Larutz Ito) was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in 1998 and translated into English by Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz in 2001 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The novel is composed entirely of letters written by Yair, a thirty-something Jerusalem bookseller trapped in an unhappy marriage, to Miriam, a woman he saw briefly at a class reunion and with whom he has become obsessed.
Miriam barely responds — the novel includes only a handful of her brief, guarded replies — and Yair’s letters become an increasingly desperate attempt to know and be known by another person. He writes about his childhood, his marriage, his body, his fears, his fantasies, his reading — everything — in letters that are simultaneously acts of self-exposure and acts of creation. He is not describing himself to Miriam so much as constructing himself through the act of writing to her.
The title — “Be My Knife” — refers to Kafka’s observation that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Yair wants Miriam (or rather, the idea of Miriam, the Miriam he constructs through language) to cut through the numbness of his daily life, to reach the authentic self he believes is buried beneath social performance.
Grossman’s achievement is to make this one-sided correspondence compelling despite its formal constraint. Yair’s voice — intelligent, self-lacerating, desperately alive to sensation and meaning — carries the entire novel. The reader becomes the letter’s true recipient, knowing Yair more intimately than Miriam ever will.
Collecting Be My Knife
First edition English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good/very good: $5–$15