David Herman
Amos Oz and the Post ’67 Generation

David Herman | Amos Oz and the Post ‘67 Generation

- Hello, and welcome to hot and sticky London. My name is David Herman, and I’m going to be talking today about Amos Oz in the third and last of my three talks about great Israeli writers. Two weeks ago, I talked about A.B. Yehoshua, and last week, about Aharon Appelfeld, and today, I’m going to be talking about their contemporary, Amos Oz. Let me begin with a rather lovely quote from Oz. “I live in the desert at Arad. "Every morning at 5:00 a.m., "I start my day by taking a walk before sunrise. "I inhale the silence. "I take in the breeze, the silhouettes of the hills. "When I come back home, I turn on the radio, "and sometimes I hear a politician using words like "never or forever or for eternity, "and I know that the stones out in the desert "are laughing at him.” Oz was born in 1939 on the 4th of May, and he was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem. He was, as I said, part of the same generation as Appelfeld, Yehoshua, and the playwright Joshua Sobol. All four were born in the 1930s. Amos Oz grew up in the 1940s at number 18 Amos Street in the Kerem Avraham neighbourhood in Jerusalem, and roughly half his fiction is set within a mile of his boyhood home. In Robert Alter’s wonderful biography of Oz, which is called “Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon.” I hope you can see that reasonably clearly on the screen. It’s part of the terrific “Jewish Lives” series, which I cannot recommend too highly, which is edited by Steven Zipperstein at California and published by Yale University Press in hardback, and each book is about 200, 240 pages by a specialist on a leading Jewish cultural, historical, or, indeed, biblical figure, and Robert Alter is… Some of you may be familiar with his work. He’s one of the great translators of the Jewish Bible and is a great literary critic, now well into his 80s, and he’s written books on Nabokov, and, indeed, on his old and very dear friend, Amos Oz. I think they met in 1970 originally.

Anyway, it’s a wonderful biography as well as a work of criticism, and I do recommend it very highly. Anyway, he writes about the neighbourhood in which Oz grew up in Jerusalem, and says, “It had a mixed population, "immigrants from different European regions, "many of them thorough secularists "with a sprinkling of religious Jews, "revolutionaries, anarchists, "ardently militant Zionists and nationalists, "flocks of aspiring writers of different stripes, "strident intellectual debaters.” It sounds like an extraordinary neighbourhood for a very bookish child to grow up in. Amos’s parents were Yehuda Arieh Klausner and his wife Fania Mussman Klausner, and they were both Zionist immigrants, Hebrew-speaking Zionist immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was born in 1910 in Odessa, famously great and vibrant Jewish cultural centre in its own right. He was born there in 1910. Famous in terms of literature, I suppose, for Isaak Babel’s stories about Jewish gangsters in Odessa. He grew up. Anyway, he was born in 1910 in Odessa. He grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home, and at the age of 11, he moved to Vilna with his parents fleeing the Bolsheviks. He studied history and literature at the University of Vilna in Lithuania, and in 1933, he emigrated to Palestine and worked as a librarian and writer. He spoke and read an astonishing number of languages, something like 15 or 16 or maybe even 17 languages. Alter describes him as bookish, relentlessly pedantic, a constant talker. Oz’s mother Fania was born in 1913.

She grew up in Rovno, then in Poland, now in Ukraine, and she was educated also in a Hebrew language high school. Her father was an affluent miller, but when his business collapsed, she left for Palestine in 1936 after a very brief time at the University of Prague in between, and she went to the Hebrew University where she met a fellow student who happened to be Yehuda Klausner, and they met at the Hebrew University in the late 1930s. In an interview in the wonderful journal “Paris Review,” Oz said, “My father was from Odessa originally "and had emigrated to Vilnius Lithuania, "which at that time was part of Poland.” It was Wilno in Poland. “My mother was from Ukraine. "Their languages were Russian or Polish. "They met in Jerusalem as students at the Hebrew University. "My father knew 16 languages and spoke 10 of them, "and my mother knew seven or eight languages too. "They spoke Russian when they didn’t want me to understand. "Otherwise, they insisted on using only Hebrew. "They feared that if I learned any European language, "I might be tempted to go back to Europe, "which they regarded as deadly for Jews.” Bear in mind that Amos Oz was born in 1939, and so when he was a small child, Europe, particularly Central and Eastern Europe, was convulsed by war, of course, and it would’ve been fatal and disastrous for any of them to go back at that time, and then, afterwards, of course, it became part of communist East Europe and Central Europe behind the Iron Curtain, so at any point, really, until 1989, or 1991, if you’re in the former Soviet Union, it would’ve been catastrophic to have returned.

“They themselves had a love-hate relationship with it, "as after an unrequited love. "They loved Europe, but Europe kicked them out.” Many of Klausner’s family members were right-wing revisionist Zionists. In fact, they were Herutniks. His great uncle Joseph Klausner was the Herut party candidate for the presidency against Weizmann and was chair of the Hebrew Literary Society at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was the first professor of modern Hebrew literature at the newly established Hebrew University in the 1920s. The great Israeli writer S.Y. Agnon, a Nobel Prize-winning author, lived across the street from Joseph Klausner, and there’s a rather wonderful passage that Alter quotes from Oz: “Whenever Mr. Agnon would rise from his place "and go over to pull out from one of his shelves "one volume or another, "the books seemed like a congregation of crowded worshipers "in dark attire, a little shabby. "His image would cast around it not one shadow, "but two or three shadows or even more. "That was how his image was incised in my childhood memory, "and that is how I remember him to this day: "A man moving in dim lights "and three or four different shadows "moving with him as he went, "in front of him, to his right, "behind him, above him, and beneath his feet.” Oz and his family were distant from religion. They considered it irrational, yet he attended the community religious school as the alternative was the socialist school affiliated with the labour movement to which his family was opposed in their political values.

After this Jewish religious community, religious school, he attended Gymnasia Rehavia. His mother, tragically, suffered from depression, and she committed suicide when Amos was 12, and this becomes one of the central subjects in his astonishing memoir, which I think, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, consider his masterpiece, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” published in 2002. He wrote elsewhere, in a piece called “A Note On Myself” in 1975, reprinted in a collection called “In the Strong Blue Light” in 1978, he wrote, “But Fania, my mother, could not bear her life "and committed suicide in 1952 "out of all her frustration or longing. "Nothing had worked out.” Soon after, at 15, Amos became a Labour Zionist, left home, and joined Kibbutz Hulda. There he was adopted by the Huldai family and lived a full kibbutz life. He changed his name to Oz, which in Hebrew means strength. When Oz first began to write, the kibbutz gave him one day a week to write. When his book, “My Michael” became a bestseller, and he’d become a branch of the farm, three days, and in the 1980s, he had four days for writing, while teaching for two days and taking turns as a waiter in the kibbutz dining hall on Saturdays. Like most Israeli Jews, he served in the Israeli Defence Forces, the IDF, and in the late 1950s, he served in the kibbutz-oriented Nahal unit and was involved in border skirmishes with Syria. During the Six Day War in 1967, he was with a tank in Sinai, and during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he served in the Golan Heights. After Nahal, Oz studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University where he was sent by the general assembly of the kibbutz. After graduating in 1963, he worked as a teacher of literature and philosophy.

“I was lucky,” he said in that interview in “Paris Review.” “I caught the tail end "of the generation of great philosophers "teaching at Jerusalem University. "The spirit of Martin Buber was still there "as were Gershom Scholem and Bergman and others.” Bergman, incidentally, was a friend of Kafka’s in Prague. “Jerusalem was then a bastion of Central European thought "from Germany and Prague, "but I was reading philosophy "while coping with generalisations "because I was a storyteller.” Incidentally, “Paris Review,” from which this is taken, I think it started up in the 1950s. George Plimpton, I think, might have been the editor, the American journalist, and every issue contains a very lengthy 40, 50, 60-page interview with a major literary figure, and if there is a particular writer who interests you, it is well worth looking through past copies to see if you can find an interview with that particular writer because they’re really fantastic interviews. It’s called the “Paris Review.” In 1960, he married Nily Oz Zuckerman, and they had three children together, including perhaps the best known is their oldest child, Fania Oz, who became a historian and a history professor in Israel. They remained in Kibbutz Hulda until they moved to Arad in the Negev Desert in 1986 due to their son Daniel’s asthma. Their oldest daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, to give her full name, teaches history at the University of Haifa. Oz has written 18 books in Hebrew and about 100 and, sorry, 450 articles and essays, and his work’s have been translated into about 30 languages, including Arabic, so in 1953, at the age of 12 ½, he lost his mother, and at the age of 14 ½, he definitively parted company from his father, becoming a kind of orphan, or, in Oz’s own words, a foundling, and the description of the Oz household…

They lived in a basement flat full of books, absolutely packed with books from ceiling to floor in every conceivable language, pretty much, and it was a difficult marriage between Oz’s parents, and he was an only child, and I think when his mother committed suicide, it was, of course, unimaginably devastating, and his father couldn’t cope, and the house, the apartment, rather, this dark, bleak apartment with just the two of them was desperately shambolic and hopeless with dirty dishes everywhere, and I think he just couldn’t, he couldn’t stand his father. His father was a difficult, difficult man, and I think his wife found him impossible in the end, and that led him to leave home as a young teenage boy, and at the same time, an interesting coincidence this, that he also broke with the right-wing Herut party, so it’s interesting that he broke with both his father and his father’s politics and moved very much to the liberal left and stayed, famously, because he was, as well as a great writer, arguably the greatest Israeli writer of his generation, though I personally prefer Appelfeld, but that’s another matter. Let’s leave that be, but he was also, of course, famously, of all the writers we’ve been talking about, certainly Appelfeld, Yehoshua, he and David Grossman were the two who became celebrated as public intellectuals who spoke out about Israel’s various wars and the state of Israel and wrote about state of Israel. I don’t mean state with a capital S. I mean the condition of Israel, the condition of being in Israel was central to Oz’s writing and his career and his work, so he went to Kibbutz Hulda, and he lived there for more than 30 years, from 1954 to 1986, and leaving Jerusalem behind, swapping his urban home for fresh air and a communal life, changing his name, and meeting Nily, who was to become his wife, and they married in 1960.

They had three children, and she, Fania, the oldest of the children, taught at University of Haifa since 1993, and in 1961, Amos completed his military service, so an extraordinary amount of change was crammed into these few years after, you know, his mother dies, he leaves his father, he leaves Jerusalem, he changes his name, he goes to live in a kibbutz, he meets a young woman, they marry, they have three children, he does military service, and he hasn’t, as yet, become a writer. Bearing in mind, 1961, when he completed his military service, he was still only 22, so all of these changes take place between the ages of 12 and 21, which is a very dramatic time, and much of that is the story, central story of this extraordinary memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” and it is, I think I would say, with the exception of Appelfeld’s writing, which I’m very partial to, as you may have learned last week, I think “A Tale of Love and Darkness” is not only Oz’s greatest book, even though it’s nonfiction, but it is possibly the greatest Israeli book by anybody, at least that’s arguable, I would say, so he completed his mandatory military service, and the kibbutz assembly sent him to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where received a BA in philosophy and literature, and then, in 1965, so he’s only 25, 26, I think he had just turned 26 when he published “Where the Jackals Howl,” his first book of short stories. He was a very distinguished short story writer, although he’s perhaps best known as a novelist, and this was his first book of fiction, and it’s about the lives of ordinary Israelis in a provincial place set against the backdrop of community life in a Kibbutz, and the fate of these individuals, their drives, their ambitions, their idiosyncrasies are grounded by the physical and social structure of their community, as Oz portrays their world as a microcosm of the wider world, and this becomes perhaps his main subject, really, life in Israel as a distinctive kind of society.

It is… He writes about the sense of living in a state of siege, the troubled relations between Israelis and Palestinians, of course, the tensions of collective life on the kibbutz because for more than 20 years, the kibbutz was his world, and indeed, he contributed a very significant percentage of his royalties to the kibbutz. It was a big part of the kibbutz’s income, eventually. He writes about the moral ambiguities of Jewish existence under British rule during the mandate, so Israel is his subject in a way that it is also for Yehoshua, as we saw, and was not for Appelfeld. For Appelfeld, his real subject was the world of East Europe that he left behind and that the world of his childhood, the world of Badenheim, 1939, and it’s a very, very different world. He was really, as the critic, Gabriel Josipovici, he said about Appelfeld, “He was really more a European writer "who happened to write in Israel rather than…” Whereas Oz was Israeli through and through. It was his subject. Hebrew was his language. It was his centre of his being, I think one could say. Its issues were his issues. Alter writes, “The Hebrew novels of the previous generation "had been, by and large, socially oriented. "Groups are often prominent in them, above all, the army, "but also the kibbutz, "which is very differently conceived "from the way it is in Amos’s fiction. "The dilemmas facing the characters in the earlier novels "are what can be called public dilemmas. "How is a young soldier "to think about his relation to the state and to his peers "when he may be called on to sacrifice his life?

"How is a person to define an individual self "and yet find ways to be integrated in a communal society?” And I suppose the influence of this formative experience of growing up on a kibbutz, bringing up a family on a kibbutz, being married in a kibbutz, I think that was, that formed his identity as an Israeli writer, that sense of the communal life and the dilemmas and issues it poses. His first novel came out the following year, “Elsewhere, Perhaps,” the fictional community of Metsudat Ram is a microcosm of the Israeli frontier kibbutz. Incidentally, the kibbutz where Oz spent so much of his 20s, 30s, 40s was only 35 miles from Jerusalem or so. It was not near the borders. It was not in the middle of the desert. Anyway, and held together by necessity and menace, the kibbutzniks in “Elsewhere, Perhaps” share love and sorrow under the guns of their enemies and the eyes of history, and it was translated by Rabbi Nicholas de Lange, translated into English, and in collaboration with Amos Oz, and Nicholas de Lange became… He lived for many years in Cambridge. I dunno if he still does, but he became Oz’s most constant translator, and it was a very interesting and fruitful literary collaboration, and something else happened in the '50s that I should have mentioned to keep to the chronology that Oz began a significant friendship with Yehoshua and to a lesser extent with Appelfeld, but particularly with Yehoshua, who was three years older than he was. Yehoshua was born in '36, and whereas Oz’s family, as I said, were from Poland/Ukraine, from East Europe, and Yehoshua was part of a Sephardi family that had lived in Palestine for generations and generations, and they were absolutely rooted in Palestine, in Israel, so although Oz was quintessentially Israeli in terms of his own biography, it’s interesting that he might have been more drawn to European subjects or the European history of his family, but he wasn’t, so we can make of that what we will.

I’ll come back to that in a moment, and anyway, that was a significant literary friendship, and then, in '67, he fought in the Six Day War, and then, in 1968, he published his second novel, which was his breakthrough novel, “My Michael,” it was called, and it’s set in 1950s Jerusalem, and it tells the story of a remote and intense woman named Hannah Gonen and her marriage to a decent but unremarkable man named Michael, and as the years passed and Hannah’s tempestuous fantasy life encroaches upon reality, she feels increasingly estranged from him, and the marriage gradually disintegrates. In 1969 to 1970, Oz spent a year as a visiting fellow at Oxford, and then, in 1970, his father died, and his father was only 60, and he died. I mean, not as tragically young as Amos’s mother, but nevertheless 60, and it was a tragic relationship between father and son, and he really was estranged from him from the beginning of his teenage years when he left home. It’s an extraordinary relationship, and his father never lived to see his son’s rise to fame, which I don’t think Amos Oz wrote about that, what his feelings were about his father not having lived to see his son become such a famous writer. Then, in 1971, the following year, he published two novellas called “Unto Death,” and then, in 1973, he wrote another novel called “Touch the Water, Touch the Wind.” I’m not sure that titles were Oz’s best feature as a writer except for “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” which is a haunting title, I think. Anyway, “Touch the Water, Touch the Wind” is an intricate tale of people constantly seeking escape from a hostile world, an escape symbolised by the watchmaker Pomeranz, a mathematician and a musician.

By the power of his music, he causes the arid earth to turn into a moist womb that receives him and his wife, not in death, but in immortality, translated by Nicholas de Lange, again, and in 1973, he fought in the Yom Kippur War, so he not only did compulsory military service, but he also served in the '67 war and in the '73 war, and then, from 1975 to '76, his kibbutz paid for him to be author in residence at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then he published, at the end of that year, another book of stories called “The Hill of Evil Counsel,” three stories in which history and imaginative narrative intertwine to recreate the world of Jerusalem during the last days of the British mandate. It’s interesting that that was such an important subject for Oz, both Jerusalem was, given that he spent so many, so much of his life, first, in a kibbutz away from Jerusalem, and secondly, in the Arab desert, in the Negev Desert, sorry, in Arad, in Negev Desert, and it’s interesting that Jerusalem, which he left barely into his teens, plays such an important part of his literary life, and also that it’s not just Jerusalem, Jerusalem of the British mandate period, which, of course, he didn’t experience himself. He was born in '39 so as a very small child, he would’ve possibly heard people talk about the British mandate, but it was not something that he kind of lived through or was, well, he literally lived through the end of it, but it wasn’t something that he would’ve been very familiar with, and yet it plays a big part in much of his fiction. Then, in 1977, he publishes his first children’s novel, “Soumchi,” and it’s about an 11-year-old boy called Soumchi growing up in British-occupied Jerusalem again just after World War II, and he receives a bicycle as a gift from his Uncle Zemach, and he’s overjoyed, even though it’s a girl’s bicycle. Ignoring the taunts of other boys in his neighbourhood, he dreams of riding far away from them out of the city and across the desert towards Africa, but first, he wants to show his new prize to his friend Aldo.

Then, in 1978, he publishes his first book of essays, “Under this Blazing Light,” and most of the essays in this book, he writes in the preface, “Are substitutes for stories "that I’ve not managed to write,” which is an interesting way of thinking about it, and it was published for the first time in English, and these essays included the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a dispute between right and right, a rather Hegelian concept, the meaning of socialism in the Israeli context, reflections on the context of homeland and on the nature of the kibbutz, and on the character of Zionism. The essays also include portraits of several Jewish writers and thinkers, so again, it’s a very Israeli book about Israeli themes and subjects, and then, for a year in 1980, he’s the writer in residence at the University of California in Berkeley, and in 1982, he publishes his next novel, “A Perfect Peace,” set in Israel just before the Six Day War, and it’s again about life on a kibbutz where the founders of Israel and their children struggle to come to terms with their land and with each other, classic Oz subjects. In 1983, he publishes his second book of essays called, inevitably, “In the Land of Israel.” He spends another year as a writer in residence in America, and then he writes a book called “Israeli Literature: "A Case of Reality Reflecting Fiction,” and then, in 1986, he makes a very significant move. He and his family leave Kibbutz Hulda after 32 years, and they move to a town called Arad in the Negev, and it’s a small town of about 20,000 people built in 1961 in the Negev Desert, and then, 1987, he publishes another novel called “Black Box,” and it’s about another couple and another divorce. Even though he was married only once and married for such a long period of time, and yet divorces also play a significant part in his fiction, so seven years after their divorce, Ilana breaks the bitter silence with a letter to Alex, a world-renowned authority on fanaticism, bearing in mind that Oz is a very, was a very temperate and moderate figure, a great champion of moderation, and yet he becomes often drawn in his fiction, particularly in his later years, to the subject of fanaticism, which is a fascinating thing for a writer to be drawn to the very opposite of what he himself embodies.

Anyway, he is begging, she is begging for help with their rebellious adolescent son Boaz, and one letter leads to another, and so it involves a correspondence between Ilana and Alex, and Alex and Michel, Ilana’s Moroccan husband, Alex and his Mephistophelian Jewish Jerusalem lawyer, a correspondence between mother and father, stepfather and stepson, father and son, each pleading his or her own case, the grasping, lyrical, manipulative, loving Ilana has stirred things up. She has really shaken the beehive, one might say, and now her former husband and her present husband become rivals, not only for her loyalty, but for her son’s loyalty as well. Then he brings out another book of essays, “The Slopes of Lebanon,” which is essentially a response to Israel’s offensive into Lebanon in 1982, and it’s also about fanaticism, which really is becoming a growing subject for him, perhaps in response to Begin’s Israel and the Herutniks and what’s happening to Israel and the ultraorthodox. He writes about the PLO, the new militarism, the growing intolerance towards the Arab population in Israel, Jewish attitudes towards the Holocaust and its misappropriation, as he saw it, by left and right alike. Claude Lanzmann’s great masterpiece, “Shoah,” the documentary about the Holocaust, the dream of Zionism and its failures, an extraordinary set of subjects, really, and then, in 1987, and he’s barely been in Arad for a year now, and he becomes a full professor of Hebrew literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, and then, in 1989, two years after this, he writes another novel.

He is very prolific writer, much more than Appelfeld, probably similar to Yehoshua in that sense. He writes another novel, “To Know a Woman,” and again, it’s worth pointing out 'cause this may not have become clear from my rather rambling disquisition about Amos Oz, but women characters are very important to Oz, much more so than to Appelfeld. Anyway, and this is a classic example, “To Know a Woman” in 1989, and it’s about an Israeli secret service agent, Yoel Ravid, who is now widowed and retired, and he lives with his mother, his mother-in-Law, his daughter, and the haunting memory of his wife, so there are three, well, four major women in the novel if you include his late wife. Then he writes and publishes another book of essays, this time on literature, called “The Story Begins,” and then he is, again, author in residence of the Hebrew University, and then he writes a novel called “Fima” and then “The Silence of the Heavens,” which is, it’s an introduction to an extraordinary masterpiece of Hebrew literature, which is S.Y. Agnon’s “Only Yesterday,” and for Oz, Agnon, who, as I say, he knew as a young child, when Oz was a young child, not when Agnon was a young child, but Agnon is a treasure trove of a world no longer available to today’s writers, yet deeply meaningful, and his juggling of multiple texts from the historical Hebrew religious library, and this collection of Oz’s reflections on Agnon, which includes an essay on the essence of his ideology and poetics. It’s a rich interpretive work that shows how one great writer views another, and then, oddly, that same year, and perhaps this is why he wrote the book, actually, it suddenly occurs to me, he was appointed to the Agnon Chair in Modern Hebrew Literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba and then he publishes another novel the following year about a teenage drug overdose, which is a sort of remarkably odd subject for Oz, and its impact, which, and this is less odd for him, on a closely knit Negev Desert settlement, and how this death throws the settlement into turmoil.

And then, in '95, he writes a book called “Panther in the Basement,” another terrible title, I think, but we’ll leave that be, and it’s the story of Proffy, a 12-year-old living in Palestine in 1947, so again, the sort of border between the mandate period, the British mandate period of Palestine, and the independence of Israel, and when Proffy befriends a member of the occupying British forces who shares his love of language in the Bible, he’s accused of treason by his friends and learns the true nature of loyalty and betrayal, and another book of essays in 1995 called “Under this Blazing Light,” and then a book of essays, “Israel, Palestine and Peace,” previously published as “Whose Holy Land?” and then comes this in '96, this interview with “Paris Review,” published in fall 1996 in issue number 140, if you want to try and track it down, and he writes, or he says in the interview, “Because our lives are soaked with history, "history is not something on the TV screens or overseas "or in the Congress or the House of Commons. "It is everywhere, "and it penetrates the most intimate issues of life. "People use moments in the country’s history "to measure time. ”'I got married just before the Six Day War,’ they say, “or, ‘My daughter was born the day Sadat came to Israel,’” and one way of thinking about Oz, perhaps, is to say that he doesn’t write what are conventionally called historical novels, but he often writes novels which are, in some ways, set in history in the past, particularly the British mandate period in Palestine, and so he has two sort of time zones, one might say.

One is this world of the past, which matters a great deal to him, and the other is very much the present, the world of kibbutzim, of military service, of Israel as it is becoming, which is very different. He has a number of shifts in the late ‘90s as writer in residence again at Tel Aviv University, at Princeton, and then, in 1998, he’s the Weidenfeld Professor of European and Comparative Literature at Oxford, which he had close links to. He was very close to Isaiah Berlin, who supervised his daughter Fania when she studied, did graduate work in Oxford, and then, in 1999, a novel called “The Same Sea,” and again, it’s a sort of curious cast of characters. There’s a prodigal son. There’s a widowed father who’s taken in his son’s enticing young girlfriend who, in turn, sleeps with her boyfriend’s close friend, and the author himself receives phone calls from his characters criticising the way he portrays them in his novel, and it’s a very odd novel of chaos and order, love and eroticism, loyalty and betrayal. Not one of his better-known novels, I wouldn’t say, and then, in 2000, he brings out a book called “The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God.” Agnon was clearly an enormously important figure for him, and then, in 2002, he publishes what I consider his masterpiece, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” which sold a million copies in three languages, so I don’t think I’m alone in saying that it’s just a fantastic book. It’s the story of his family and culminates in his mother’s suicide, but as Robert Alter points out, it’s also the story of the formation of the writer’s self as it is embedded in and emerges from the family. Alter is very, very good.

This is perhaps one of the best parts of his book on “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” He’s very good on what he considers things untold by Oz in his memoir in that it seems to be the first time he really deals as a subject with his mother’s suicide, which was obviously the central trauma of his life, and it seems very honest about his parents’ difficult relationship, about what a difficult man his father was, and so on and so forth, but as Alter rightly points out, there are also things untold in the book, for example, about the Holocaust. As Alter writes, “Very little was known of the Nazi genocide "in the , "of the Zionists’ community of Palestine "during much of the war, "and Amos turning six at the end of the war "could not have learned of it till some years after.” Much as I hugely respect Robert Alter as one of the great translators and literary critics and literary authorities of our time, I would say I think young children can pick up an awful lot that is said and unsaid around them, even if it’s said in different languages. My parents also, incidentally, when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying, would also, they would speak in German, so this was not, I think this was not uncommon in immigrant or refugee families, but I don’t know. “Could not have learned of it till some years after.” I think there’s learning and there’s learnt, and children can pick up an awful lot that is unsaid around them, even if they don’t yet know what exactly it is that creates this atmosphere of darkness around them. Anyway, Alter continues. He makes a few brief references to the Shoah, the Holocaust, in the book, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” but it surely came to cast a deep shadow over his consciousness. Well, that’s exactly my take, I suppose.

He would discover that almost all of his mother’s family, who’d remained in Rovno, were murdered by the Nazis as well as many friends and beloved teachers from the school. “Amos never wrote fiction "that was directly about the genocide, "but his haunting novella ‘Crusade,’” writes Alter, “is a displacement onto the middle ages "of the mindset impelling the modern mass killers.” He also said, Alter, that is, that one of the other things untold in this memoir is that Amos chooses not to register the terror he must at times have felt during the attacks by Arabs in Jerusalem in 1947 when he would been only seven or eight, but again, I think he would’ve picked up the sense of terror from his parents, from the neighbourhood, the neighbours and friends, and thirdly, another very different kind of gap in Amos’s story of his childhood has to do with his precociousness. Books, literature, writing pervaded the basement apartment, and again, Oz doesn’t want to sound boastful or to show off, but he clearly was a remarkably precocious reader, and particularly from his mother. His father was more of an academic and librarian and so on, but his mother loved reading, and she gave him this love of reading which ran through his entire life, and then, a year later, he wrote a book, “How To Cure A Fanatic or Help Us To Divorce,” which brings up two of his main subjects in his later years, fanaticism and divorce. I don’t think they’re related, but actually, it’s not a novel; it’s two essays, one about the true nature of fanaticism, with particular reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, touching on Arafat’s death and the war in Iraq, and he says that his main argument is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but a real estate dispute, one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise.

As he writes, “The seeds of fanaticism "always lie in uncompromising righteousness, "the plague of many centuries,” and interestingly, after that title, the following year, he brings out a book, “Help Us To Divorce: "Israel & Palestine - Between Right and Right,” so bringing up, again, familiar themes from his work, his earlier work, and then, in 2006, he publishes “How to Cure a Fanatic,” again, and in 2007, he publishes a book called “Rhyming Life and Death,” about writing, and the plot is very simple. It’s eight hours in the life of an author, set in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night. A literary celebrity is giving a reading from his new book, and as his attention wanders, he begins to invent lives for the strangers he sees around him, and one life story builds on another, and the author finds himself unexpectedly involved its creations, and then, in 2009, he publishes “The Amos Oz Reader,” which draws on his entire body of work, loosely grouped into four themes, I suppose, the kibbutz, Jerusalem, the idea of a promised land, and his own life story.

And then, in 2009, a book of short stories, “Scenes from Village Life, and then, in 2012, a book called "Between Friends,” where he returns to the kibbutz of the 1950s, and then, in 2014, he writes a book called “Judas” set in Jerusalem towards the end of the ‘50s, and then he moves to Tel Aviv, and then, in 2017, he writes his last book, “Dear Zealot,” and he died in 2018 in Tel Aviv. One thing that I haven’t found a way of fitting in is American literature. He was very passionate about three American writers in particular: Herman Melville, as in “Moby-Dick,” Sherwood Anderson, and William Faulkner, in that order, he says: “I admire other American writers, "but those three are the ones I would single out "in American literature,” and someone wrote about him, a critic wrote about him, “The stories are constructed as concentric circles "focusing on a psychological conflict, a psychic drama. "That drama is typically the kernel of the story, "and around this inner ring, "the narrative builds a family drama, "which is a projection "of the tensions within the psychic drama.” Anyway, I should really finish here because it’s 10 to 6:00, and it is time to address your questions, so I hope that gives you a sense of the life, the times, the context.

Q&A and Comments:

Karen Lewin: Prove, please, the problems with Fatah, PLO, and Hamas in the '60s and '70s. Karen, that’s a fantastic question, but I don’t think there is time, really, to address all of these issues over such a long period. Forgive me, but that is a 50-minute talk in its own right.

Q: Eliot and Lynn: could you repeat the author and title of the book you mentioned at the beginning of the talk?

A: Oh, Lordy. Oh, I think it was Robert Alter, and it’s called “Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon,” published by Yale University Press in the “Jewish Lives” series, and it is a wonderful book by a wonderful critic who knew Oz very well for almost a half a century, which is why I suppose he calls him Amos throughout the book, Oz.

Monty’s iPad: Listeners might be interested in a book published about a series of lectures Oz gave in Germany called “How to Cure a Fanatic: "Israel and Palestine Between Left and Right.” Thank you. Yes. Interesting article about book in “The Jerusalem Report” magazine dated July 29th, 2024, so very recent. Thank you so much for that recommendation.

Myrna’s iPad: Please mention the name of the series on “Jewish Lives.” Yes, it is called… It’s published by Yale University Press, and it’s called “Jewish Lives,” and they’re handsomely published books edited by Steven Silverstein, one of the great literary critics who himself is publishing the volume on Philip Roth in that series, and later this autumn, the very good Jewish American literary critic Ruth Franklin is bringing out a book on Anne Frank in this series, “Jewish Lives,” so do look it up in any book shop or on Amazon. Romaine Stanger:

Q: Could you provide your e-mail address?

A: Yes. Let me just send it to you. There. Hope that’s sent.

Romaine Stanger, no, sorry, it’s Shelly Shapiro first.

Q: Did Oz ever reconcile with his father?

A: A very good question. Robert Alter doesn’t address it. I think he didn’t is the answer. I think there was just too much difficulty between them, and I suspect, but I don’t have evidence for this, that Amos Oz blamed his father’s difficulties as a man on mother’s suicide.

• [Hannah] Dave, can I interrupt and ask you a quick question? This is Hannah.

• Sure.

• [Hannah] Did you mean to send your e-mail address privately? Or are you okay with it being shared with all the attendees?

• Oh, I’m okay for it if… I’m happy for anyone to have it, so feel free.

• I’ll adjust that for you.

• You’re very kind. Thank you so much. My apologies .

Q: Romaine: Does he address the way his writing addresses the issues of strength versus weakness on emotional level?

A: This dilemma seems to have plagued his childhood. I’m not sure that I would agree that strength versus weakness is such an important issue in his writing. There are many important themes, and I’ve tried to point out a few. I’m not sure that I would say that is one of them, but I’m very happy to defer to you or anyone else on this.

Hillel Schinker: It should be noted that his father insisted that he go to a kibbutz with a high school, and the principal of the high school was the family which received him. The biological son of that family is Ron Huldai, the mayor of Tel Aviv for the past 26 years. That’s fascinating, and I thank you so much for that. Yes, his father did indeed insist that he goes to a kibbutz with a high school, whether that was to get rid of this troubled son, or whether, because the son was desperate to get away from both his father and the home where his mother committed suicide, I really don’t know. I’m Sorry.

Hillel, again: A.B. Yehoshua was Amos Oz’s counsellor in the Scouts youth movement. Wow. Well, I didn’t know that. These are really fascinating points. Thank you so much for that. Speed along. Romaine: I too resonate more with Appelfeld. I’m glad to hear that. He takes on the past in a much more tender way, perhaps because his early childhood was easier than Oz’s. I also think his sensibility is gentler. He did have a very gentle sensibility. I wouldn’t say that his early childhood was easier. His mother and grandmother were killed by the Nazis. He spent years of his childhood hiding in the forests and the woods and the fields of Bukovina and then travelled around Europe till eventually settling in Palestine, where he wrote extensively in later years about the difficulties of becoming a Jewish Palestinian, so I wouldn’t say that his childhood was easier, although it’s true that his mother didn’t commit suicide, but, well, which is easier? Having your mother killed by the Nazis? Or having your mother commit suicide? I think I will leave that to you all to decide for yourselves.

Carrie Supple: Thank you for your, thank you for your kind words, Carrie. I appreciate them.

Beverly Price: It is a remarkable comment on socialist Israeli life back then, and on its self-assurance in the society, that he felt able, safe, and trusting to leave home at 14, have in mind a place to go, and where he became part of a surrogate family, not deemed homeless or a missing child, as would be true today. Yeah, very interesting point. Yes.

Q: Shelly: What do you know about his wife?

A: I know nothing about his wife. Interestingly, Robert Alter barely writes about her at all in his book, and I haven’t seen anything about his wife, I’m afraid, or, indeed, about his children, apart from Fania, who is very well known as a public intellectual in her own right.

Bobby Steger: Thank you for your kind words.

Gita Carr: No one wrote as intuitively from a woman’s point of view as Oz. That’s a very interesting point. Thank you. Yes, I mean, it’s certainly the case that he created more compelling women characters and wrote a lot about women and marriages and marriages going wrong, so that’s a very interesting observation.

Q: William Chinofsky: Who wrote “time to stop sitting shiva for the Holocaust?”

A: I’m sorry, . I do apologise.

Romaine: 12 for heroes. So I don’t know what this means, 12 for heroes and age his mom killed herself, she was tragically young. She was in her very, very early 30s. It was awful, absolutely awful.

Diane, thank you for your kind words.

Shelly Shapiro: Moby-Dick is certainly a story about fanaticism. Well, obsession. Is obsession the same thing as fanaticism? I will leave that to you all to consider.

Shelly Lassman. Sorry, Sheila Lassman. I do apologise. He wrote together with his daughter a book about the Talmud. Don’t remember the title. I will tell you the title. It was one of his very, very last books called “Jews and Words” published in 2012, one of his very last books.

Susan’s iPad: Thank you for your kind words.

Michael Block: The name of his most famous book, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” published in 2002 originally. Wonderful, wonderful book.

Q: David Freund: Please repeat the three American authors Oz favourite.

A: Herman Melville, Sherwood Anderson, and William Faulkner, in that order, he said, and the title of the book you describe is “Eight Hours in the Life of an Author.”

Oh my Lord. I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t find the note . If I can track it down, I will send it to you.

Judith Yousiskin: I do agree that a child can and does pick up feelings around. Particularly remember hearing my parents and their friends in English talking about what was happening over there, in inverted commas, as I was sitting under the table. It made a huge impression on my life. Thank you for sharing that, Judith, and I think you’re absolutely right.

Aviva Laskoff: Thank you. Thank you for your kind words.

A.D. Cochran: Thank you for your kind words. Right. I’m sorry. It’s 6:01. I must love you and leave you. Thank you so much for all your fascinating questions and suggestions and insights. Thank you for joining me over these past three weeks.