If I hadn’t been a writer, I’d be in jail

disturbed by the resurgence of antisemitism in the country.

“It’s confusing because when I am in Paris I don’t see a drop of it. I have been Israel Horovitz for a long time and no one is going to come up and make some terrible antisemitic remark to me,” he says. “But I have a television and I see the marches on the street. It’s not like there are millions of people parading with Hitler salutes but there are hundreds, and I don’t see thousands running to stop it. . . I have very intelligent, powerful Jewish friends who are horrified and talking about leaving France.”

Born in 1939, Horovitz grew up in the “white little Protestant town” of Wakefield, Massachusetts. “I would hear, almost on a daily basis, somebody say, in some form, ‘Why did we not just give the Jews to Hitler? Why did we lose all our American boys?’ That’s the town I grew up in. Now there’s a synagogue in town.”

If the world outside his home could be cruel, inside it could be tough, too. Horovitz’s father was an “unhappy guy”. He wanted to be a lawyer but had been forced to leave law school early. After driving trucks for years, he achieved his dream at the age of 50. “He was really violent,” says Horovitz. “As a child, I thought my role in life was to run between my mother and father when they were having a violent argument, and deflect my father’s anger so he wouldn’t kill my mother.” His father changed after becoming a lawyer but “it was too late”, says Horovitz. “I was already 16 and had one foot out of the door.”

It is no exaggeration to say writing saved Horovitz. He cites, too, the support and encouragement of people like Samuel Beckett, who became a significant figure in his life.

I ask Horovitz if he ever thinks about his legacy. Not normally, he says. But today is different: just before I called, he and his wife had been watching the first cut of a Moving: Israel Horowitz struggled to contain his father’s violent mood swings when growing up documentary that a young French film-maker has been making about the writer for the past four years.

“I was sitting in this hotel room, playing the thing on my computer, with people giving testimony, and I was sobbing. Absolutely sobbing.”

He didn’t know how it would turn out when the director came to him, because she “was just a kid with a camera” and so he was generous with his advice. His voice cracking with emotion, Horovitz adds: “I guess you could marry that to my knowing how important it would have been to have somebody put his arm around me and say, ‘Yes, you can do that. You can be a playwright.’ And Beckett did that with me. And Thornton Wilder did that with me. And my high-school English teacher. In a kid’s life, this can be a life-jacket that keeps you afloat. It’s amazing the responsibility we old ones have.”

‘My Old Lady’ is reviewed on P47