A Tale Of Love And Darkness

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. This memoir/family history brims over with riches: metaphors and poetry, drama and comedy, failure and success, unhappy marriages and a wealth of idiosyncratic characters. Some are lions of the Zionist movement—David Ben-Gurion (before whom a young Oz made a terrifying command appearance), novelist S.Y. Agnon, poet Saul Tchernikhovsky—others just neighbors and family friends, all painted lovingly and with humor. Though set mostly during the author's childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940s and '50s, the tale is epic in scope, following his ancestors back to Odessa and to Rovno in 19th-century Ukraine, and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove them with their families to Palestine in the early 1930s. In a rough, dusty, lower-middle-class suburb of Jerusalem, both of Oz's parents found mainly disappointment: his father, a scholar, failed to attain the academic distinction of his uncle, the noted historian Joseph Klausner. Oz's beautiful, tender mother, after a long depresson, committed suicide when Oz (born in 1939) was 12. By the age of 14, Oz was ready to flee his book-crammed, dreary, claustrophobic flat for the freedom and outdoor life of Kibbutz Hulda. Oz's personal trajectory is set against the background of an embattled Palestine during WWII, the jubilation after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the violence and deprivations of Israel's war of independence and the months-long Arab siege of Jerusalem. This is a powerful, nimbly constructed saga of a man, a family and a nation forged in the crucible of a difficult, painful history. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine An international novelist of stature, Oz makes an assured leap to autobiography and is greeted with reverence and awe. Aware of the universality of his story, he enlists excerpts from the diaries of friends and relatives to provide a broader context. He also forgoes tying his narrative to a strict timeline, opting instead for a circular approach. Settings and characters bear the vibrant imprint of his descriptive skills. For all the praise, a few devilx92s advocates lurk out therex97David Cesarini of The Independent calls the prose "dense x85 almost liturgical"x97but even he concedes that itx92s an impressive piece of work. It is rare for a fiction writerx92s life to be more dramatic than his novels, but such is the case with Oz. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist "Books filled our home," writes Oz, as he presents the first of many gorgeously detailed descriptions of the humble settings of his often-harrowing Jerusalem boyhood. The only child of multilingual, literature-loving parents, Oz was destined to be a writer, even though he harbored fantasies of a more overtly heroic life. In a memoir as effulgent as his fiction, this internationally celebrated, capaciously observant, and bedazzling writer unfurls the complex story of his fascinating family history, one that encompasses the heartbreaks of the Diaspora and the Holocaust, and brings to vivid life the violence, fury, fear, determination, and sorrow that brought Israel into being, and that set in motion the intractable conflicts that still rage today. But for all its acute anecdotal and philosophical parsing of the larger world, this generous, gracefully meandering, many voiced, eventful, gently funny, and often magical reminiscence revolves most around Oz's mother and her tragic death. A powerful story of the making of a writer on the scale of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale [BKL O 15 03], Oz's panoramic memoir enhances the history of literature and of Israel, and the literature of examined lives. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved PRAISE FOR AMOS OZ"A commanding artist who ranks with the most important writers of our time."-Cynthia OzickPRAISE FOR THE SAME SEA"Impressive and moving . . . Oz tells the story of ordinary people in an extraordinary manner . . . Literature that is both spiritually moving and secularly provocative."-Los Angeles Times Book Review — AMOS OZ (1939–2018) was born in Jerusalem. He was the recipient of the Prix Femina, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Primo Levi Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award, among other international honors. His work, including A Tale of Love and Darkness and In the Land of Israel , has been translated into forty-four languages. From The Washington Post Of all the terrible questions that Alice is asked in Wonderland, the most terrible is puffed out by the hookah-smoking Caterpillar: "Who Are You?" As Alice knows, the question has no answer. The only speck of the world that must remain invisible to us is our self. In our own eyes, we can be nothing but looking-glass images, always plural, the reflections that others send back to us and that we incessantly make ours or reject. An autobiography is therefore at best a kaleidoscopic pattern of imagined memories and intuitive leaps that portrays not one author but several, or at least a protean author moving endlessly between past and present, ignorance and experience, reflection and surprise. As such, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz's autobiography is utterly successful. Both in his fiction and his essays, Oz has proven himself one of our essential writers, laying out for our observation, in ever-increasing breadth and profundity, the mad landscape of our time and his place -- always enlarging the scope of his questions while avoiding the temptation of dogmatic answers. His latest exploration, A Tale of Love and Darkness (beautifully translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange) appears to merely chronicle Oz's life from childhood in British-ruled Jerusalem to literary fame in Kibbutz Hulda, where Oz (born Amos Braz) still lives and where he adopted his nom de plume. But there are no single straight lines in Oz's narratives; for him, all things are plural. The family house where he grew up; the languages spoken by his family; the complex personalities of its members; the books that crowded the shelves of his widely read parents and turned the boy into "a word child"; the recurrent references to his mother and her death when the boy was just 12 (a death that, we learn halfway through the book, was a suicide); the state about to be born in a world still bloody from the war; the crowds of refugees and pioneers and survivors that peopled it; Oz's literary masters, ranging from Chekhov (in Hebrew) to Sherwood Anderson (in English): Every event, every factual detail, every discovery opens myriad doors to other events, facts and unexpected revelations. The writer who attempts his autobiography is, Oz suggests, like a man who "knocks on the door of a house where he is a regular visitor and where he is used to being very warmly received, but when the door opens, a stranger suddenly looks out at him and recoils in surprise, as though asking, Who are you, sir, and why exactly are you here?" I felt an eerie sense of deja vu reading Oz's description of the daily goings-on during the early years of the state of Israel. My father was named Argentina's ambassador to Israel when I was only a few months old, and the first seven years of my life were spent in the same Babel as Oz's, where adults switched to other languages to avoid being understood by the children and where conversation drifted from German to Russian, from Spanish (in my case) or Polish (in Oz's) to French and English and Yiddish, when not to the rigors of Hebrew. The same "scholars, musicians and writers" described by Oz, the same "Tolstoyans" (whom Oz's parents referred to as "Tolstoyshchiks"), the same "cultivated Englishmen with perfect manners," the same "cultured Jews or educated Arabs" glided in and out of my childhood world as they did in Oz's. And of course the same Holocaust survivors, of whom my governess had told me I must never ask anything, especially not the meaning of the black numbers tattooed on their arms, and whose rage was solid, palpable, like that of the old man whom Oz describes hissing words full of hatred at him and his playmates: "A million Kinder they killed! Kiddies like you! Slaughtered them!" -- as though, Oz adds, "he were cursing us." Oz describes what it was (and is) like to live in a country that, since its inception, has been constantly under threat; and he tells of the painful relationship between Arab and Jew. "In the lives of individuals and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted," he writes. "It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will unite out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor. . . . Often each sees in the other not a partner in misfortune but in fact the image of their own common oppressor." Arabs, says Oz, see Israeli Jews not as "a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East," while Israelis see Arabs not as "fellow victims" but as "pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as if our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads and grown moustaches, but they are still our old murderers interested only in slitting Jews' throats for fun." It is impossible to give a full account of this book's riches. Oz has allowed his autobiography to flow along a rocky course, with numerous starts and various endings. Wisely, he does not impose the restrictive method ordered by another of Wonderland's creatures: "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end, then stop." Oz knows that every autobiography is circular and that, even though the writer begins telling his story at the moment when the book must end, the points of entry are legion. The first words of A Tale of Love and Darkness are the conventional ones -- "I was born" -- but many times throughout the book Oz offers the reader other possible starting places: "I was an only child," or "Almost sixty years have gone by, yet I can still remember his smell," or "Every morning, a little before or a little after sunrise, I am in the habit of going out to discover what is new in the desert," or "I was actually a very easy child. . . . " To the impossible question of the Caterpillar, Oz answers with a multitude of reflections, each one essential and each one necessarily incomplete. Halfway through A Tale of Love and Darkness, in what could be yet another beginning scene, Oz hears the first chords of Beethoven's "Für Elise" played by a girl he calls Nemucheleh, "stumbling over and over again, always in the same place, and each time trying again," while a bird he calls Elise replies to her "over and over again" with the famous five first notes. The repeated, ever-beginning tune may serve as a model for reading this extraordinary, luminous, wise and important book -- each new attempt at commencement strengthened by preceding ones, and by the ones to come. Oz's last words, describing the tragedy of his mother's death, support this suggestion. After taking a handful of sleeping pills and falling into a sleep free at last from nightmares, she is rushed to the hospital, where doctors try to wake her. But, Oz tells us, "she did not wake up in the morning either, or even when the day grew brighter, and from the branches of the ficus tree in the garden of the hospital the bird Elise called to her in wonderment and called to her again and again in vain, and yet it went on trying over and over again, and it still tries sometimes." Reviewed by Alberto Manguel Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I WAS BORN and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment. My parents slept on a sofa bed that filled their room almost from wall to wall when it was opened up each evening. Early every morning they used to shut away this bed deep into itself, hide the bedclothes in the chest underneath, turn the mattress over, press it all tight shut, and conceal the whole under a light gray cover, then scatter a few embroidered oriental cushions on top, so that all evidence of their night's sleep disappeared. In this way their bedroom also served as study, library, dining room, and living room. Opposite this room was my little green room, half taken up with a big-bellied wardrobe. A narrow, low passage, dark and slightly curved, like an escape tunnel from a prison, linked the little kitchenette and toilet to these two small rooms. A lightbulb imprisoned in an iron cage cast a gloomy half-light on this passage even during the daytime. At the front both rooms had just a single window, guarded by metal blinds, squinting to catch a glimpse of the view to the east but seeing only a dusty cypress tree and a low wall of roughly dressed stones. Through a tiny opening high up in their back walls the kitchenette and toilet peered out into a little prison yard surrounded by high walls and paved with concrete, where a pale geranium planted in a rusty olive can was gradually dying for want of a single ray of sunlight. On the sills of these tiny openings we always kept jars of pickles and a stubborn cactus in a cracked vase that served as a flowerpot. It was actually a basement apartment, as the ground floor of the building had been hollowed out of the rocky hillside. This hill was our next-door neighbor, a heavy, introverted, silent neighbor, an old, sad hill with the regular habits of a bachelor, a drowsy, still wintry hill, which never scraped the furniture or entertained guests, never made a noise or disturbed us, but through the walls there seeped constantly toward us, like a faint yet persistent musty smell, the cold, dark silence and dampness of this melancholy neighbor. Consequently through the summer there was always a hint of winter in our home. Visitors would say: It's always so pleasant here in a heat wave, so cool and fresh, really chilly, but how do you manage in the winter? Don't the walls let in the damp? Don't you find it depressing?Books filled our home. My father could read sixteen or seventeen languages and could speak eleven (all with a Russian accent). My mother spoke four or five languages and read seven or eight. They conversed in Russian or Polish when they did not want me to understand. (Which was most of the time. When my mother referred to a stallion in Hebrew in my hearing, my father rebuked her furiously in Russian: Shto s toboi?! Vidish malchik ryadom s nami!-What's the matter with you? You can see the boy's right here!) Out of cultural considerations they mostly read books in German or English, and presumably they dreamed in Yiddish. But the only language they taught me was Hebrew. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent. On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered. For all that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were dear to their Russian souls, I suspect that Germany-despite Hitler-seemed to them more cultured than Russia or Poland, and France more so than Germany. England stood even higher on their scale than France. As for America, there they were not so sure: after all, it was a country where people shot at Indians, held up mail trains, chased gold, and hunted girls. Europe for them was a forbidden promised land, a yearned-for landscape of belfries and squares paved with ancient flagstones, of trams and bridges and church spires, remote villages, spa towns, forests, and snow-covered meadows. Words like "cottage," "meadow," or "goose girl" excited and seduced me all through my childhood. They had the sensual aroma of a genuine, cozy world, far from the dusty tin roofs, the urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, the parched hillsides of our Jerusalem suffocating under the weight of white-hot summer. It was enough for me to whisper to myself "meadow," and at once I could hear the lowing of cows with little bells tied around their necks, and the burbling of brooks. Closing my eyes, I could see the barefoot goose girl, whose sexiness brought me to tears before I knew about anything.As the years passed I became aware that Jerusalem, under British rule in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, must be a fascinatingly cultured city. It had big businessmen, musicians, scholars, and writers: Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, S. Y. Agnon, and a host of other eminent academics and artists. Sometimes as we walked down Ben Yehuda Street or Ben Maimon Avenue, my father would whisper to me: "Look, there is a scholar with a worldwide reputation." I did not know what he meant. I thought that having a worldwide reputation was somehow connected with having weak legs, because the person in question was often an elderly man who felt his way with a stick and stumbled as he walked along, and wore a heavy woolen suit even in summer. The Jerusalem my parents looked up to lay far from the area where we lived: it was in leafy Rehavia with its gardens and its strains of piano music, it was in three or four cafés with gilded chandeliers on the Jaffa Road or Ben Yehuda Street, in the halls of the YMCA or the King David Hotel, where culture-seeking Jews and Arabs mixed with cultivated Englishmen with perfect manners, where dreamy, long-necked ladies floated in evening dresses, on the arms of gentlemen in dark suits, where broad-minded Britons dined with cultured Jews or educated Arabs, where there were recitals, balls, literary evenings, thés dansants, and exquisite, artistic conversations. Or perhaps such a Jerusalem, with its chandeliers and thés dansants, existed only in the dreams of the librarians, schoolteachers, clerks, and bookbinders who lived in Kerem Avraham. At any rate, it didn't exist where we were. Kerem Avraham, the area where we lived, belonged to Chekhov. Years later, when I read Chekhov (in Hebrew translation), I was convinced he was one of us: Uncle Vanya lived right upstairs from us, Doctor Samoylenko bent over me and examined me with his broad, strong hands when I had a fever and once diphtheria, Laevsky with his perpetual migraine was my mother's second cousin, and we used to go and listen to Trigorin at Saturday matinees in the Beit Ha'am Auditorium. We were surrounded by Russians of every sort. There were many Tolstoyans. Some of them even looked like Tolstoy. When I came across a brown photograph of Tolstoy on the back of a book, I was certain that I had seen him often in our neighborhood, strolling along Malachi Street or down Obadiah Street, bareheaded, his white beard ruffled by the breeze, as awesome as the Patriarch Abraham, his eyes flashing, using a branch as a walking stick, a Russian shirt worn outside the baggy trousers tied around his waist with a length of string. Our neighborhood Tolstoyans (whom my parents referred to as Tolstoyshchiks) were without exception devout vegetarians, world reformers with strong feelings for nature, seekers after the moral life, lovers of humankind, lovers of every single living creature, with a perpetual yearning for the rural life, for simple agricultural labor among fields and orchards. But they were not successful even in cultivating their own potted plants: perhaps they killed them by overwatering, or perhaps they forgot to water them, or else it was the fault of the nasty British administration that put chlorine in our water. Some of them were Tolstoyans who might have stepped straight out of the pages of a novel by Dostoevsky: tormented, talkative, suppressing their desires, consumed by ideas. But all of them, Tolstoyans and Dostoevskians alike, in our neighborhood of Kerem Avraham, worked for Chekhov. The rest of the world was generally known as "the worldatlarge," but it had other epithets too: enlightened, outside, free, hypocritical. I knew it almost exclusively from my stamp collection: Danzig, Bohemia, and Moravia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ubangi-Shari, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. That worldatlarge was far away, attractive, marvelous, but to us it was dangerous and threatening. It didn't like the Jews because they were clever, quick-witted, successful, but also because they were noisy and pushy. It didn't like what we were doing here in the Land of Israel either, because it begrudged us even this meager strip of marshland, boulders, and desert. Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: "Yids, go back to Palestine," so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: "Yids, get out of Palestine."Copyright © 2003 by Amos Oz and Keter Publishing House Ltd.Translation copyright © 2004 Nicholas de LangeAll rights reserved. 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