If you buy a ticket to travel to other countries, go to admire the monuments, palaces and squares, museums, historic sites and landscapes. If you're lucky, you might have the 'opportunity to exchange the four words with the locals. Then you return home, bringing back a handful of photographs and postcards. But if you read a novel, is like buying a ticket that takes you to the deepest recesses of a 'more land and another people. Reading a foreign novel is an invitation to visit the house of other people and places of a private 'other reality. If you're just a tourist, you might linger a long way to see an old house, in the old town and see perhaps a woman staring out the window. Then you turn around and you leave. If you are a player, you will also see that woman staring out the window, but you'll be next to her in that room, in her thoughts. If you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people's living rooms in their offices and in their schools, since in their bedrooms. You will be invited to share their secret sorrows, moments of joy in the family, their dreams. That is why I believe that literature is a bridge between peoples. I believe that curiosity can be a virtue ethics. I am convinced that the imagined 'other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagine the 'other will make you not only the best men in work or in 'love, but you become better human beings. The tragedy is between Jews and Arabs in part in 'inability to so many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine the' other. Imagine the 'more real: In love, in terrible fear, anger, passion. Prevails among us' hostility, curiosity rather scarce. Jews and Arabs have something essential in common: in the past is one that others have been treated with contempt and brutality, the violent hand of Europe '. The Arabs through the 'imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and humiliation. The Jews through discrimination, persecution, expulsions, and finally mass extermination. It could think that the two victims, two victims of the same species oppressor, would develop among them a sense of solidarity. Alas, it does not work, either in fiction or in life. The worst conflicts in fact speak out often among the victims of the same oppressor: the children of a violent parent does not necessarily prove the sympathy 'for a' more. Indeed, often seen in 'more a reflection of their executioner. And it is well between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. While Arab Israelis consider the Last Crusade, an 'extension of' white and colonial Europe, many Israelis, for their part, the Arabs see the new incarnation of their former oppressors, the instigation of pogroms and the Nazis. Questa situazione fa ricadere sull' Europa una speciale responsabilità per la soluzione del conflitto arabo-israeliano: anziché rimproverare e ammonire ora questi, ora quelli, gli europei dovrebbero estendere solidarietà, comprensione e aiuti agli uni e agli altri. Non occorre più scegliere se essere a favore di Israele o a favore della Palestina: è necessario essere a favore della Pace. Forse la donna alla finestra è una palestinese di Nablus. Forse un' ebrea israeliana di Tel Aviv. Se volete aiutare a ristabilire la pace tra queste due donne alle finestre, fareste meglio a informarvi su di loro. Leggete i romanzi, cari amici, vi insegneranno molte cose. È giunto il momento che persino ciascuna di queste due donne si informi meglio sull' other. To learn, finally, that cos 'is that it fills the' other woman in the window of fear, anger, hope. Certainly not to say that reading novels can change the world. But I suggest, and I am firmly convinced that reading novels is one of the best ways to understand that all women, all windows, with trepidation and anxiety, just waiting for peace.
Amos Oz
www.corriere.it
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