Before ‘The Ground Floor,’ Dror Mishani won acclaim for crime fiction featuring the detective Avraham Avraham. Photo by Lukas Lienhard/Diogenes Verlag
By Robert Zaretsky
May 17, 2025
Though the literary scholar Dror Mishani has a glowing reputation, both in his native Israel and across Europe, as a crime novelist, whose detective Avraham Avraham, has been enthusiastically compared to Jules Maigret and Kurt Wallander, I first discovered Mishani in an interview he gave a few months ago in the French newspaper Le Monde.
The subject was his most recent work, translated into French as Au ras le sol or The Ground Floor. Rather than a crime novel, the book is a journal that Mishani kept during the first several months of the war in Gaza. Reading it, I was, well, floored by Mishani’s searing reflections on a different order of crimes, those committed by Hamas but also Israel, since Oct. 7, 2023.
Though the journal has been critically acclaimed across Europe, in Israel, published under the title Hatmuna Haktana, it was met largely by silence. Though the book has yet to be translated into English, his book urgently demands the attention of Americans, regardless of their religious or political beliefs. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Robert Zaretsky: Your crime novels have been compared to the work of Le Carré and Simenon. At first glance, this journal is far afield from the work that has made you famous. But at second glance, I wonder if the two genres are really all that far apart.
Dror Mishani: I was in the middle of writing a new crime novel on Oct. 7, but the massacre and the war that followed forced me to stop. The idea of the intimate journal had preoccupied me for years — as both a scholar and a translator. After Oct. 7, the form seemed to offer itself — perhaps the only one capable of capturing and arresting the landslide of events, tragedies, and moral ruptures. It allowed me to write in the present tense, to testify to what we’re going through.
An insightful reader recently told me that I haven’t entirely left the detective genre — that this book, too, is an investigation, an attempt to decipher life here after Oct. 7. I think she’s right. Through this diary, I’m also trying to understand how we allowed this catastrophe to happen, and where we might be heading. As in my novels, I fear the answers are grim.
And yes, this too is a book about crimes — those committed against us, and those we are committing.
The book’s title in the French translation is Au ras du sol, or “At ground level.” I can draw a few meanings from the phrase — i.e., “a ground-level look or perspective” suggesting the refusal of distance or elevation. Or, perhaps, the leveling of not your perspective, but the leveling or, better yet, the flattening of people’s homes or lives. There are yet others, I imagine. What does this phrase mean for you?
The French title was chosen by my editor at Gallimard, Marie-Caroline Aubert. It echoes a line from my last crime novel (Conviction in English, Un simple enquêteur in French), where my inspector, Avraham Avraham, argues that the ground floor is the right place from which to observe a tragedy — not because it offers the widest view, but because it’s the only place where you can truly see human faces.
In the war diary, I return to that idea on a particularly significant day — one when I felt that the dominant narratives circulating in Israel about the war’s causes, whether global power struggles or a clash of civilizations, were in fact ways of avoiding the human reality of the victims. Au ras du sol is my counterpoint to the view from the drone or the fighter jet. The journal is a literary stance, a tool to resist the dehumanization that so often accompanies armed conflict and particularly this one.
From the very start of your journal, when you rush back to Israel and your family upon learning about Oct. 7 while in France for a book festival, you repeatedly remind yourself, often in italics, to “write the truth and the whole truth.” Could you say a bit more about this?
Since Oct. 7, inventing has become almost impossible for me. Fiction suddenly felt like the wrong kind of witness to what we’re living. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of real tragedies unfolding around me. It’s as if the victims of this war are asking: Why create fictional stories when ours haven’t been told yet?
As a novelist, I know that fiction has its own power to bear witness to catastrophe. But I’ve always believed that the novel’s “royal tense” is the past tense — that it requires time, distance, and the emotional recul that literature allows in order to shape a narrative of the past. And we don’t have that right now. We’re still inside the catastrophe. And we need to act — urgently. The diary is a form made for urgency — for the catastrophe that is unfolding, not the one that is already over. Such works of witnessing can testify to the atrocities as they happen, so that we might still have a chance to stop them.
One of the ways you trace the evolution and impact of events is through your relationships with your wife Marta and teen-aged children, Sarah and Benjamin. Could you speak about the difficulties in writing these passages?
As a novelist, I’m used to the veil — sometimes even the armor — of fiction. My family was, in a sense, shielded, and so was I. With the diary, it had to be different. I was writing in my own name, about the people closest to me, knowing they might read it — now or years from now. In that sense, this is not only a war testimony; it’s also my honest, and often painful, testimony as a partner and a father.
Will they find me guilty when they see that my love and empathy also come with moments of anger, envy, and fear? Will they judge me for what I did — and didn’t do — during this time?
And this is crucial: My partner, Marta, is neither Israeli nor Jewish. My children are “half Jewish” according to me, and not Jewish at all according to the State of Israel. Years ago, we moved back here after living in Cambridge. I always told myself we did it “for them” — so they would belong.
But now I’m forced to confront the consequences of that choice — of that wish, my wish, to belong. In a year or two, they’ll be of age for military service, which is mandatory in Israel. Will they be asked to participate in a war I see as unjust? Will they be forced to take part in crimes I object to with all my being?
If a diary is also a literary mirror, then what I see reflected in it sometimes horrifies me. Isn’t this the old story — the sins of the fathers visited upon their children? Or perhaps the story of fathers — like Avraham, the name I gave my detective —silently accompanying their children as they are taken off to destroy and be destroyed?
As you were keeping your journal, you were also keeping two other texts by your side: Homer’s Iliad and the Book of Ezekiel. Can you say something more about your deep ties to these works?
Literature has never mattered more to me — or given me as much — as it has since the war began. I’ll try to explain why.
I recently discovered that there was once an epistolary genre called the “letter of solace” — I came across it in Abelard and Heloise. In it, you wrote to someone in distress by recounting your own misfortunes, as a way to console them: to show that greater suffering had existed, and could be endured. I think this was the primary, raw function literature served for me — especially literature that narrates catastrophe.
It was as if Homer, or Natalia Ginzburg, or Stefan Zweig — because I wasn’t only reading about the Trojan War or biblical destruction, but also accounts of WWII, like Zweig’s The World of Yesterday — were sending me personal letters of solace from their respective zones of destruction. Their words comforted me by showing that they too had passed through terrible suffering.
Secondly, I turned to literature as an antidote to the horrific imagery and reductive discourse I saw on Israeli television. Ultimately, Homer is deeply ironic about the very idea of victory and compassionate toward all sides. At times, he even transforms moments of pain and grief into eternal images of beauty. That complexity offered a counterweight to the one-sided, nationalistic, and hysterical press here desperate to inflame rage and thirst for revenge, while refusing to acknowledge Palestinian pain.
A friend who read the diary asked me: Why read now such violent works as the Book of Ezekiel? Maybe I shouldn’t — but even read in a fully secular way, they seem to reveal so much about how we got here, and perhaps even how to stop the catastrophe.
Take, for example, the final chapters of Ezekiel: God reveals Himself to Israel through the total annihilation of its enemies. We must acknowledge this violent face of our God — and reckon with its consequences, not only for our history, but for our present politics.
Among the many heart-wrenching exchanges you have with family and friends is one you have with your mother at her apartment. It is a conversation — if that is the word — that unfolds in the company of a silent but observant Sarah. Could you say a bit more about this scene?
Writing about my mother was probably one of the most difficult parts of keeping this diary (maybe it’s worth noting here, that, when Oct. 7 happened, I was in the middle of writing a crime novel about a son accused of trying to assassinate his mother.)
But it felt inevitable. Aren’t our most fundamental ideas of belonging and home, of estrangement and exile, shaped, in some way, through our relationship with our parents? I do think that the closeness — or distance — we feel toward our biographical home has an influence on our political positions, and especially on our freedom to be critical of our own country.
The first conversation with my mother described in the diary speaks to both of these conflicts. On one level, it’s deeply personal: I found myself accused of not knowing how to belong, of not understanding what it means to feel at home in one’s own country (or in other words: of being alienated from her). But on another level, it was a deeply political conversation, in which I was trying to argue that the so-called “liberal” politics of the old Labor Party, which my mother identifies with, is just as responsible for our ongoing national disaster as today’s far-right government (or in other words: that if I’m alienated , it has something to do with her behavior too). And in a way, I think we’re both right.
What made this scene especially significant for me was that my 15-year-old daughter, Sarah, witnessed it. At first, I was devastated, because I felt exposed. But later, I began to think it might have been good for her to see it. These moments — when you begin to perceive the complexity of adult conversations, when you catch the emotional history behind every word, when you see both vulnerability and self-delusion — aren’t these the very moments when one begins to become a writer?
Midway through your journal, a funny thing happens on your way to buy an ice cream cone. A young girl in front of you cannot decide which flavor she wants. As she samples one flavor after another, you begin to lose your patience — until, that is, you realize she might be from “là-bas”, the French phrase for “over there.” Or, in this insistence, “down there.” This image strikes me as a constant presence in the journal.
Despite the fact that everyone in the region was, in one way or another, affected by the war, there are certain places and people who truly went through hell. On Oct. 7, it was the Israelis living near the southern border. Since then, it has been the inhabitants of Gaza, and to a lesser extent, the West Bank.
Every war has its own là-bas — those zones of utter destruction, the killing fields where atrocities beyond imagination take place. We know they exist — perhaps we’ve caught a glimpse of them on TV — but we haven’t been there. In World War II, it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for us Jews, it was the death camps — primarily Auschwitz. In the 1950s and 60s, when someone in Israel said that a person came from là-bas, it meant they had survived the camps. You whispered this là-bas, as if afraid of waking a dormant evil spirit.
I think this word holds respect, guilt, and perhaps even shame — shame from those who had not experienced war in its most brutal form. Even we, who think we understand something of war, know nothing of what it truly means to live là-bas — to inhabit the depths of that suffering.
But perhaps là-bas also serves as a warning — for those on the periphery of war, who believe it can be quickly overcome and forgotten. It reminds us: there is always a là-bas, a real hell on earth that we know nothing about and will haunt long after the war is “over.” And là-bas might be also the hell waiting for all of us in the next war — unless we find a way to prevent it.
Time and again, you question the importance of literature and writing. You ask yourself, “Why bother?” yet you continue to bother, concluding that bothering to write is vital. Why, though?
Honestly, I don’t know what to say beyond the fact that if I stopped writing, I wouldn’t know how to live. The keyboard is all I have to resist the indifference to suffering, the racism, the thirst for vengeance that now prevail in my home. If I ever decided to stop writing, I might as well leave this place — and vice versa: if I left, I would probably stop writing.
There’s a passage by Flannery O’Connor that I’ve always loved: “There is a knowledge that the novelist finds in his community. When he ceases to find it there, he will cease to write, or at least he will cease to write anything enduring. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
Maybe that doesn’t apply to every writer, but I’m afraid it applies to me.
My destiny placed me at that particular crossroads — my time is a time of war, and my place is Israel/Palestine. I can’t escape that. All I can do, for now, is live this crossroads — even if it crushes me — and try to write it.
Towards the end of the journal, it seems that the tensions and tears in your ties with Marta and children have been resolved. But broader tensions, with life as an Israeli who has long felt estranged there but not entirely at home abroad — do not seem to have not been resolved. Was that really the case then? If so, does it remain the case now?
To be honest, Robert, I think I forced a false closure on this diary.
In truth, nothing has been resolved. Israel is deepening and widening its destruction of Gaza, and no protests seem able to stop it. Israeli society is being taken over by extreme right-wing militants who are reshaping all its institutions, advancing a vision of total destruction for the Palestinians — and we seem powerless to resist them.
And on a personal level too — my son is supposed to join this army in 18 months, and I don’t know how to cope with that, except perhaps by leaving. But I don’t want to leave, even though writing fiction here — my ultimate joy and raison d’être — still feels impossible.
Sometimes I regret ending the diary. But I also know that if I had continued writing it up to this point, it would have become much more desperate, much more painful.
