Ron Leshem writes hit series like “Euphoria” and bestsellers like “Beaufort”. “For me it’s about stirring up empathy, because without it we lose democracy,” says Leshem ntv.de, also with a view to his homeland Israel. He reveals how to endure frustration as an author.

ntv.de: Ron, we spoke for the first time in 2008. At that time you presented your bestseller “Beaufort” in Germany. I recently shared your book “The Secret Bazaar” on Instagram because the protests in Tehran made me think of it. Then I googled you curiously. You are now also developing award-winning series such as “Euphoria”, “No man’s land”, “Incitement” and others. And now your new book “When we were beautiful” has just come out here in Germany.

Ron Leshem: It’s been a lot going on in the last few years!

What do you want to talk about first? About the new book? your series? Or about the writing itself? You can decide.

Oh, I could tell a lot about everything. Let’s start with the book.

Fine. “When We Were Beautiful” is the story of Daniel, a young Israeli traveling through Latin America. He falls in love with Nora, who tells him about her project: an AI called “Ocean” that allows you to immerse yourself in someone else’s memories. Then something happens to Nora and Daniel has to deal with his own difficult past. The book is now published by Rowohlt, but it was published in Israel in 2019.

Yes, right before the pandemic, about two months before everything started.

Your book is about empathy in a broader sense. I feel that the issue has become even more important during the pandemic.

Globalization was already in crisis before the pandemic, but then Covid gave us an excuse to behave misanthropic, to close our borders. I actually didn’t want to write about empathy at all, it sort of broke out of me. Ultimately, we are all less willing to empathize with how others are doing. This breaks my heart. If you live in Tel Aviv and a few kilometers north Syrian parents lose their son in a war, do you still sympathize? Your neighbor might be transgender. Do you understand him even if it’s not exactly what you’re going through?

“You’re welcome to discuss with me who took revenge on whom first. If that’s important to you. But I wish you would also feel for the people who live there. Would share the pain of a boy who lost someone – like you.” (Excerpt from “When We Were Beautiful”)

Why is that?

Among other things, the death of truth. For a functioning democracy, people must be willing to think about complex things. But today it is almost impossible to talk about complex ideas. People choose what they want to believe. And we are only at the beginning here. Once Deep Fake is here, I can watch a clip of my Prime Minister saying something and I can decide if I think it’s real. That kills journalism. The industry I come from and which is one of the most important for me. If news only happens on TikTok, anyone can brainwash us. Democracy will not survive this.

How can we change that?

By all doing what we both already do as writers: always try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. That’s what my book is about. Do you understand the other person better when you see the world through their eyes?

Your book has many perspectives, basically you could have made four books out of it. We get to know Daniel’s best friend Magouri, experience their childhood together in the Israeli settlements, their love for surfing. Magouri’s grandmother and her life in Egypt then appear in the sideline. Where do you get all the details from?

Writers who are or were journalists are simply in love with the research process. If I want to travel to Egypt in the 1950s, I watch films, listen to the music, surround myself with 100 images. Then I can imagine how it felt back then. That’s the beauty of being a writer. In the USA, the identity debate has developed in such a way that all Hollywood producers would say to you: wait a minute, you are a German woman? Then you must not write about a Chinese, Israeli or American person. You can only write about yourself. Yes, it helps minorities, promotes authentic voices and diversity. But I also find it tragic for the writing profession. I don’t want to write about myself. The whole idea is to get to know and understand the character as you write. I felt a strong connection to all of my characters. The only exception was when I was writing about the Rabin killer for a film that won the Israeli Oscar. That was the first time I was really disgusted with a character I was writing about. That’s why I like working with German production companies, I have the feeling that there is even more openness here. (Leshem is cooperating with the RTL Group, to which ntv also belongs, for his series “No man’s Land”, editor’s note)

In your novel you use the fictional “ocean” to describe a technology that makes it possible to immerse yourself in the memories of other people and to interact with the deceased. There are efforts in the field of brain technology to actually create something like this. Where will this path lead us?

I believe that we are on the edge of the next digital and technical revolution and do not yet understand how significant the changes will be. Let’s take the human genome. If we’re going to be able to change genes, it means we’re the last generation of Homo sapiens. After more than four billion years in which nature ruled over us, evolution created everything. So far we have only identified the genes. If I change something, I don’t know yet if I’m just changing the hair color or other things. At some point we will want to change our characteristics. But is it a good idea to turn off depression, for example? We also owe some brilliant ideas and many works of art to the Depression. We gave up our privacy just like that. Without a worldwide discussion as to whether we want that. And now Google knows everything about us. By the time we reach singularity, the point where AI is smarter than human intelligence, we may be able to download some form of memory onto a computer. That would be the first step to my ocean, where you can walk around in the memories, like on google maps.

“If your mother remembers one half of the street and my mother remembers the other half – why shouldn’t we mix those memories together in a single room with no partitions? (…) Basically I’m collecting memories and gluing them together.” (Excerpt from “When We Were Beautiful”)

The Israeli army is a theme that repeatedly finds its way into your books, films and series. But your attitude towards it seems to have changed since your success with “Beaufort”, right?

If I look back at what I wrote fifteen, seventeen years ago, I’ve changed my mind in many ways. But there are also many differences between the army unit stationed far away from everyone, which I describe in “Beaufort” and the soldiers in “When We Were Beautiful”, who have to go into the occupied territories. My idea for “Beaufort” was more like a spaceship. A kingdom of children stuck there cut off from time and space and starting to develop their own language. It’s also an anti-war story. In “When We Were Beautiful” we see everyday life in the army during an occupation. What these young men experience in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip is a different story altogether. Here we have Daniel, a young man who is traumatized because his mother was killed in an assassination attempt. Trauma is our greatest illness.

Do you think the trauma explains the current success of the right-wing populist parties in Israel?

Yes, that is the result of raising our children in the shadow of the Holocaust. Over the years, more and more traumas have been added. Between 2000 and 2005, the years in which the novel also partly takes place, there was constant fear of deadly terrorist attacks in Israel. When one side suffers such trauma and on the other side there is the trauma of the occupation, it explodes into violence and hatred. If you look at the US, they’re sick of a lot of things. But the young people are much more liberal than in Israel. Here the youth are on the right edge, they primarily elect Benjamin Netanyahu and then come the right-wing parties. This is the generation that was raised in the early noughties. There are also those who grew up in the settlements and were traumatized by the withdrawal from Gaza. They say: We will never again allow the state to evict us from our homes. Their anger has meant that the right-wing populist parties have now come to power. They are in the minority at about 15 percent, but they run the country now. Leaving Gaza and evacuating the settlements was the right and wise way. Not only for the Palestinian people, but also for Israeli society. We left Gaza because we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But then Hamas took over. What many critics of Israel fail to understand is that this is a regime that executes people. Homosexuals, women, all people who oppose the regime. In Israel, on the other hand, many of the liberal, left-wing protesters are exhausted. So those filled with hate win. The hate gives them the energy.

Before we get off the topic of books: What is your favorite book at the moment?

I don’t know what it’s called in English or German, but the Cairo trilogy by Nobel Prize winner Nagib Mahfuz does. Cairo is so close to me and also plays a role in my novel. I am married to a man whose Jewish family is from Kurdistan and when I read Nagib Mahfuz it reminds me of our family.

It’s time to make a decision again. TV series or writing and thinking?

wow Wait. writing and thinking!

OK. What is your favorite job at the moment? Write, produce, think, sleep?

Writing a novel is so lonely it just kills me. But I still long for it, I really miss this loneliness when I’m doing something else. When I’m working on TV series, I’m surrounded by friends and partners. We love working on the stories together. Now one of my series has been sold to Korea and I’m so excited to see what kind of interpretation there will be.

How does your everyday life look like?

I wake up at 5 a.m. every day and when it’s busy and I’m too scared, I start work right away. If not, I go for a run and listen to a podcast. I’ve become a father, so my favorite thing to do is spend the mornings with my baby. These used to be my best times to write – I liked to write from 5am to 8am. When you create TV series, the rhythm is very different. You have an idea, then you pitch it, then you write, then you film, then post-edit, launch. So no matter what I’m doing right now, I miss the other. I sleep really little.

That was a good answer, but we still don’t know what you would most like to be doing right now.

At the moment? I would like to be at the beach. On a lonely island. Lying in the sand with a fedora on your head.

Everyone is with you this time of year. Do you have any tips for others who work creatively? How do you deal with fear and frustration?

There are always frustrations. Let’s take “Euphoria”. I knocked on every door for six and a half years and couldn’t find producers for the series until HBO’s Casey Bloys and Francesca Orsi took the show. I had originally planned the story as a book and in Israel all publishers said: nobody wants to read that, only divorced women read books anyway. Until I was eventually able to make an Israeli series out of it. And then at some point HBO grabbed it. So that would be my tip. Don’t stop fighting for it when you’re convinced of your idea.

And now the series has been honored at the Golden Globes.

Yes, Zendaya won the Best Actress award. But the long search is nothing unusual. Even series like “Mad Men” took fifteen years from idea to implementation. You have to come up with a dozen ideas at the same time because you never know when the right moment will come. But you should only write one story at a time. Also, you have to make a decision to write, not even try it for a year or something. Sometimes it takes time to be successful. Then you should find partners who believe in you and open doors. Most importantly, find a story that really grabs you. A lot of people are desperate to succeed, so they think about what might work. But you have to be sure that if in doubt you want to deal with the topic for years. You have to find your unique voice. Especially since the market is being flooded right now.

Are there things you would like to write or produce?

My problem is that when I walk into a room, I’m always asked about the next espionage or war story, which is what we Israelis are famous for.

Series like “Fauda” or “Homeland”.

Yes, exactly. I can also write about war, but I might be interested in the relationship between a father and his son. Right now I’m trying to get the networks excited about a show about a tantra workshop and how couples and singles create a bucket list of their fantasies. But I don’t get the green light for it.

So you don’t dream of things you don’t dare to write, but of things you can’t get away with?

Yes. The limitations are on the other side. Seriously.

Let’s stick to the series. We can also expect series from you in Germany.

Exactly, the brilliant team currently working on the German adaptation of “Euphoria” is trying to be even better than the HBO version and find an authentic voice for the German Generation Z. The series has also been sold to India, so I’m looking forward to seeing the different cultures bring their voices there. We are currently producing the second season of “No Man’s Land” with RTL Fremantle in Morocco. And we’re working on a new Israeli-Filipino-American crime series. Oh yes, and then I work with Achim von Borries, who worked as a director and screenwriter on “Babylon Berlin”. A show about a scientist who went to the US after the war.

How many series is that in total?

Hard to say. I never know what will happen next. That’s the dozen ideas I was talking about. Some drag on for years.

But you come from the news business, so you’re used to multitasking.

Yes, but you’ll get your rewards promptly. You make a website and an app, you make new decisions every minute! I’ve been waiting ten years.

Was there a series that you enjoyed watching recently?

The British HBO and BBC drama series ‘Years and Years’ starring Emma Thompson. So good I was jealous I wasn’t a part of it.

Samira Lazarovic spoke to Ron Leshem