Dove of Peace with a Black Wing, or the Double Life of Professor Martin Gross

Prof. Martin Gross is a busy man. In the morning he lectures to students of the dental faculty of Tel Aviv University, he receives patients at the dental clinic during the day and looks forward to the evening to lock himself up in his home office and immerse his hands (fingers like the genius pianist Van Cliburn) into a completely different material .

“This is how I saw the dove of peace in the early 90s after the Madrid Conference,” says Professor Martin Gross, removing a weighty sculpture from a shelf. - And here is the same pigeon, but with a damaged wing.

The bird, symbolizing the world, was transformed beyond recognition in the artist’s imagination after a series of explosions in buses that followed the signing of the “Oslo Agreement” ...

Wandering stars

Martin Gross was born in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

“In the post-war years, there were about 400 Jewish families throughout the country,” he recalls. – There was a synagogue in Nairobi, it was “commanded” by a rabbi, a native of the Czech Republic. On Sundays we attended Jewish school...

Michael Gross, the father of Martin, was born in Poland, but Jewish fate constantly drove him from place to place.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, after another pogrom, my father’s family had to flee Poland,” says Martin Gross.

At that stage, Germany was considered the most powerful European state in which Jews are not in danger.

“My father grew up in Leipzig,” says Professor Gross. – When Hitler came to power and it became dangerous to stay in Germany, dad got himself a visa to Switzerland. For five years he earned his living by playing the trumpet and violin in hotels and entertaining guests. Every year the visa had to be extended...

Having matured and settled down, Michael abandoned music, studied to be a dentist, opened his own clinic in Kenya, and (restless creative nature!) Became interested in visual arts.

Martin's mother, Ursula Wolf, was born and raised in the town of Greifswald in northern Germany. Ursula's father was a book publisher. When the Nazis came to power, the Wolf family moved to Potsdam, but the clouds over the German Jews continued to rapidly gather, and the father sent his 17-year-old daughter as part of a charity mission to Kenya. There she met the wanderer Michael Gross and married him.

Martin was born after the war (by that time, two daughters were growing up in the Gross family).

In 1960, a coup took place in Kenya. Ominous clouds once again gathered over the Jewish refugees from Germany. Michael Gross had to leave the dental clinic and “evacuate”, this time to London. By that time, Martin was 11 years old - he graduated from school and university in the capital of Great Britain. The son followed in his father’s footsteps - he chose the specialty of a dentist.

In 1969, Martin went on an internship in Chicago. Upon his return, he opened a clinic in London and began teaching at the university’s medical faculty.

By that time, Estelle, Martin’s elder sister, lived in Israel. The younger brother visited her regularly: back in 16-17-year-old, he came twice as a volunteer to Kibbutz Amiad in the north of the country ...

“I have always felt a blood connection with Israel,” explains Professor Gross. – This is where my roots are. Only here do I feel like myself.

In the 1977 year, 28, the “old” bachelor, Martin made his ascent to Eretz Yisrael. The London specialist was immediately admitted to a private dental clinic in the Bavli district in North Tel Aviv. In parallel, Dr. Gross began teaching at the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, where he now heads the department. Following Martin in 1979, the parents repatriated.

From 1980 to 1982, Martin served in the IDF (“He treated his teeth at the base in Mtrifin”).

Soon the young doctor met Fanny, a repatriate from South America (her walls are hung with the walls of the salon of Grossov's apartment). The wedding was played in the country club in Savyon.

Medical practice and teaching at the university take a lot of time, but an artist lives in the soul of Martin. Only here, in Israel, the alter ego of a London dentist finally broke free. Everything in this divinely insane country torn by monstrous internal contradictions predisposes to artistic comprehension. On the one hand - the richest history, on the other - the sheer uncertainty in all that concerns the future. Love is interspersed with hatred, peaceful respites give way to terrible bloodshed, and when another calm comes, the nation with truly masochistic rapture destroys itself from the inside by artificially contrived conflicts.

Gross - thin nature, gifted. He must, he simply must find the only accurate metaphor for the holy passions of the Holy Land. To master the tools, Martin studies the art of sculpture.

And then doves appear. Bronze, gilded, silver ... The body of each bird is the whole universe: Jerusalem, the Eternal City, uniting, according to Gross, the whole world.

Here are the Jaffa Gates of the Old City, and here are the Lion and Damascus Gates... Here is the area at the Western Wall, and here is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the center of the Christian world. The Via Dolorosa artery reaches to the Temple as to the heart. And this is the Al-Aqsa Mosque: the Temple Mount (a grim irony of the tragic Jewish fate) rises above the Western Wall. Try to draw a line between the shrines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, if one of them is the heart of a bird representing the “planet Jerusalem”, another is its circulatory system, and the third is its brain. Moreover, in real Israeli life (to quote “The Ballad of a Smoky Car” by Alexander Kochetkov) “love and death are inseparable, love and death are always together”...

Gradually, more and more pigeons appear in the apartment of the university lecturer - and each of them symbolizes the changeable and fragile realities of our volcanic region. Birds (some with broken wings and head thrown in death agony) already live their own lives. It seems that they did not just escape from the hands of their creator (the first dove was derived from the peacemaking euphoria that engulfed some of the Israelis after signing the “Oslo Accords”), but completely subjugated his imagination. The harsh reality of the cunningly cruel region dictates its laws to the Master, and most of them in no way fit into the illusory formula “peace in exchange for the land.” Because in exchange for the “Oslo Treaty”, blood flows like a river on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, on Dizengoff in Tel Aviv, in Afula, Netanya and Hadera.

Now Martin Gross, like other compatriots who began to see clearly under the pressure of perversely ugly, devoid of any logic of "post-Oslo" realities, forks not only between profession and hobby, but between the "religion of the world" that fascinated the world and the deadly reality. With all his being, the Master also strives for peace, he selflessly dreams of him - only his hands do not obey ... The sensitive fingers of a born sculptor-pianist-surgeon lead not the mind, but the heart. After each next bloodshed, after each cold-blooded murder, Martin Gross's pigeons writhe in agony. And they die with a dumb question in their eyes: “For what ?! After all, I - a symbol of peace! But where is he, the world that I have to bring to the planet Jerusalem ?! ”

Illusions and Reality

If you put all Martin Gross's pigeons in a row, you can trace almost all the dramatic events that have shaken our region over the past 20 years by the birds' poses, color and wingspan: the hope for a peaceful settlement after Oslo; shock after the tragedy in Hebron, when Dr. Baruch Goldstein rushed with a weapon into the Muslim prayer hall in the Cave of the Patriarchs... The assassination of Rabin... Kepm-David of the year 2000 with timid hope for “peace in exchange...”: Al-Aqsa Intifada - the Arab response to the expressed Barak's readiness to make the most large-scale territorial concessions...

— Do you see the footprint of a child’s foot and the traces of the grooved sole of men’s shoes? - Professor Gross points to the defeated pigeon. – During the Al-Aqsa intifada, Palestinians used children as “human protective shields”; terrorists used children as cover. By the way, it was during that period that my eldest daughter Natalie served in the army in the settlement of Beit El and was responsible for the activities of the headquarters for the protection of the civilian population from terror.

However, all three children of Martin and Fanny Gross served in the combat units of the IDF. Neely, the middle daughter, was an engineer instructor, a specialist in bombs and mines, and coached young fighters.

“And son Uriel is a reservist soldier in the airborne units,” says Martin Gross. “During his conscript service with the Special Forces Paratroopers, Uriel fought in the Gaza Strip. And now he is getting higher education...

— Why do you think the Palestinians every time respond with bloodshed to Israel’s expressed readiness to make extremely painful territorial concessions?

“Yes, because they are not ready to compromise, they need everything or nothing, they dream of expelling us from here,” says Professor Gross. - And they are not fighting a war for lands at all. World Islam unleashed a jihad against Western civilization on purely religious grounds. Secular Arabs behave much more intelligently, but unfortunately they are in the minority, at least in our immediate environment.

Martin Gross believes that radical Islam, the personification of which is the regime of Iranian ayatollahs, will suffer a crushing defeat in the war of civilizations.

- What miracle?!

“There are a lot of sane secular people in Iran,” he explains. “And sooner or later they will overthrow the ayatollahs’ regime.”

— What, in your opinion, are the reasons for the demonization of Israel in the international arena?

“I explain this by the fact that the Arab propaganda machine is much stronger than the Israeli one,” says Professor Gross. – The Palestinians know how to present themselves as an innocent victim of the “Israeli occupation”, and pity for the weak works flawlessly. The whole world is on their side. By the way, here is a dove symbolizing Ariel Sharon. This is what he aimed for when he founded Kadima and decided to implement his plan of “unilateral disengagement.” And this is what happened to him after that... But the dove that was mutilated in the Second Lebanese War...

Next to the desktop Gross perched compact electronic organ.

-Are you playing?

- Yes. Sometimes I'm drawn to the classics.

— Professor Gross, as far as I understand, in 20 years you have accumulated enough works for an artistic and journalistic personal exhibition. Where and when have you already exhibited?

“Nowhere and never,” my interlocutor smiles.

-?!

“No one has yet offered me a personal exhibition, and I don’t have time to negotiate with gallery owners: I’m absorbed in my professional activities - I’m writing a book on dentistry in English,” Professor Gross concludes.

Photo by the author