For a person who loved and lived words, the funeral of Batya Gur was almost devoid of speech. Hundreds of family members, friends, acquaintances and others who loved her, including former students, came to the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon. Silent and weeping, they stood in front of her coffin, and afterward at her grave. Writers, poets, academics and journalists came to accompany Gur on her final journey.
Gur, a wise, sharp-eyed writer and critic who died of cancer on Thursday at the age of 57, chose to live and be buried in Jerusalem - a traditional Jewish burial.
The funeral procession was simple and restrained. In the funeral home, her husband, literary scholar Ariel Hirschfeld, chose to thank the doctors and nurses who took care of her during the nine months of her illness, those who "gave us hope, on which Batya relied until her last day, and the entire period of suffering was very meaningful to her," he said. He ended his words with a stanza from a Nathan Alterman poem of which Gur was especially fond:
"I will yet come to your threshold with lips extinguished. I will yet stretch out my hands to you. I will yet say to you all the good words that exist, that still exist."
Afterward, Gur's son Udi eulogized her: "You once told me that after the age of 20 or 25, a child can no longer come to his parents with complaints about what they did or didn't do to him," he said. "That is one of the many things I learned from you, and the truth is that in any case, I don't have many complaints."
He spoke about her struggle with her illness, which involved "faith and will and creativity and softness and gentleness and love and a will to live. And although the illness overcame you in the end, I feel that you were the big winner, because this struggle was won in another sense of life - it showed how one should live life, even when confronting the danger and the terror of death."
Gur was born in Tel Aviv to parents who were Holocaust survivors, grew up in Ramat Gan and studied at Tikhon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv, where she was part of a group of young men and women with a high degree of political and social awareness. She then served as a teacher-soldier in Ofakim and became aware for the first time of the situation of the development towns. For years she worked as a teacher of literature, because she believed in the power of education to shape and change people.
Touching the Israeli reality
It was only at the age of 39 that she turned to writing, producing her detective novel, "The Saturday Morning Murder" (1988), which was a great success. In this book, she created the thoughtful detective Michael Ohayon, who starred in her later detective stories as well - all of which touched, in some way or other, on the Israeli reality, on social and political problems, on the distress of people who live on the margins of society: "Literary Murder," "Murder on a Kibbutz," "Murder Duet," "Bethlehem Road Murder" and "Retzah, Mitzalmim" (Murder, We're Filming), her last book, which was written in the wake of the television series she wrote for Channel 2, which was directed by Ram Levi.
Over the years, Gur published dozens of pieces in Haaretz on literature, culture and art. She taught writing at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem and lectured at the Hebrew University and the Open University. Her books were very successful in Israel and internationally, and she was often invited to lecture abroad.
Gur never hesitated to express her political views, which were identified with the social, economic and political left. In the last two years alone, we can recall two incidents in which Gur was at center stage: First, when she told Border Policewomen who were holding an old Palestinian man for questioning that their behavior reminded her of Nazi Germany; and second, when she leveled criticism, during a lecture in Brussels, at the policies of the Sharon government, which she said encourages suicide bombers.
"Batya was a teacher for life, 100 percent" says journalist Roni Kuban, a former student in the script writing track at the Jerusalem film school, where Gur taught for 15 years. "There are many people who are sharp and critical, but she left her mark - she not only wrote books and articles, she also read her students' texts, giving them an ironic smile and saying: `Write, write,' and this gave them fuel for an entire year. There aren't many people who in addition to writing themselves, take up the torch of education as well," he says.
Gur did in fact leave her mark: After years of teaching literature, she decided to begin to write herself. "The idea of a woman who was a teacher and a mother and a housewife, who suddenly locked herself in her room and began to write, and all this in an atmosphere that was much less accepting toward women than that which exists today, is exceptional," says Kuban.
"For me, she is not only the mother of Israeli detective fiction, she is also the mother of [Israeli] women's literature, even though she didn't like the concept. But I hope that she'll be remembered for it."
Many of Gur's students - both at the film school and in the high schools where she taught - remember her as one of the people who had a decisive influence in shaping their world view. Among the dozens of reactions appearing on Web sites after her death, a former student wrote: "In high school with Batya, I learned how to read poetry and to love it. I will always be grateful to her for that, and for the fact that she opened the wide world of literature to me. I learned from her how to read a text and how to relate to a written word. I'm certain that many other students are mourning her death."
Another student wrote: "I learned from you to love literature and poetry, and I remember you as a warm human ray of light in the darkness of high school. I always waited breathlessly for your next book - life without Michael Ohayon will be grayer."
Eran Barak-Medina, who attended a short-story course taught by her at the Spiegel school, says that Gur demanded that her students use their heads. "You have to think, to know, to understand," he says. "She had a rare insight into literature, as though she knew how to decipher some code in the stories, and when that happened, everything suddenly looked simple - even the complex stories of Kafka became relevant and understandable. What I learned from her was not to allow myself to give in on the small details of writing, that every word and every letter should be the best truth that can be achieved," he says.
Deciphering the riddle
Roni Koban also took Gur's short-story course. The class used to discuss classic stories, and afterward the students would read texts that they had written themselves. "It was a real ceremony. Batya placed a chair in the center of the classroom and we all sat around her. She approached the texts with sanctity, and taught us how to criticize a text and how to talk about it. She asked each one of us to take out a piece of paper and write more than three comments, because she wanted the criticism to be meaningful.
"I haven't met anyone who read texts the way she did. She explained to us where our work came from, even if we weren't familiar with the source. She had a combination of knowledge, a passion for culture and literature and an uncompromising humanity. People said that she was a tough woman, but she was tough in the positive sense of the word, there were things on which she was unwilling to compromise - the Hebrew language, for example, or the fact that she hated fads, she hated works that were written entirely in the present tense.
"She could argue with you about a word in a Kafka story, and insisted on spending entire lessons on Alterman, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Yaakov Shabtai. But she also liked up-to-date cultural phenomena; for example, she loved Tarantino. One day, she returned all excited after see "Killing Bill," and explained to us how it relates to Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and the myth of the vengeful woman.
"I started to study last year, and I was already working on the daily edition of the Channel 10 news. It was hard for me to attend all my classes, but I did everything possible to get to hers. As a journalist I have interviewed many writers and people who write and know how to speak, but there was really something different about her.
"Her lessons were like a lesson in a Beit Midrash (traditional Jewish study hall) or a yeshiva, there was something very Jewish about it. The text was always in the center of the table and the ambience was a stimulating atmosphere with something powerful to it, of how we would now succeed to decipher this riddle."
