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April 22, 2005/Nisan 13 5765, Volume 57, No. 34
Life and history converge in Oz's poignant memoir
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Israel will soon celebrate its 57th birthday.
Give yourself a gift.
Immerse yourself - and immerse is the only word to describe the experience - in Amos Oz's "A Tale of Love and Darkness," (Harcourt Brace, $26 hardcover). The affecting memoir of Israel's preeminent writer, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange, tells not only Oz's story, but also Israel's story, evoking what it was like to come of age with the Jewish state and how that convergence of time and place informed Oz's art even as it defined his life.
At once a compelling biography and a resonant history, the book is enriched by the very humanness of Oz's experience and the acute perspicacity and artfulness of the writer.
Oz begins at the beginning, with his birth in 1937 Jerusalem to Arieh Klausner and Fania Mussman Klausner.
"I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceiling 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 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."
Oz's meticulous attention to detail is evident, his descriptions purposeful.
The spare Jerusalem apartment characterized his parents' meager life, and that of many, if not most, of their neighbors, other Eastern European refugees who came to Israel in the years before statehood. But it hints, too, at their aspirations for themselves, and their only precocious son, in the brightly colored cushions, the pride in having a room that could function as study and library.
Arieh Klausner was a scholar whose education was cut short when his family was forced to leave Odessa because of rising anti-Semitism. His wife, Fania, arrived in Israel with her parents and two sisters at about the same time, also to escape the impending Nazi tide. Fania was drawn to literature and the arts. She was, according to her son, a storyteller, a dreamer, a romantic.
Life in the new country was hard, and existence, especially then, tenuous. Oz tells of his paternal grandmother's obsession with cleanliness, his mother's melancholy even as she married and had a son. Not only had her privileged life been exchanged for a hard day-to-day existence, but many of the beloved intimates of her youth, her teachers, her friends, her neighbors, were gone. They were rounded up and murdered in 1943 or 1944.
Perhaps that is what led to her recurring depression, and her suicide at the age of 38; Oz was just 12 when it happened.
Oz, up to that time an avid reader, already a dabbling writer and an excellent student, begins to drift. At the age of 15, he leaves his father, who has since remarried, and goes to live on Kibbutz Hulda, where he remains for 30 years.
He changes his name from Klausner to Oz, Hebrew for strength, and aspires to be the protypical Israeli, blonde, browned from the sun, hardened by physical labor in the field. He acclimates to kibbutz life, but begins, secretly at first, to scribble stories in the kibbutz study room late at night.
Oz has written 19 books, collections of short stories and novels. His work has been translated into 30 languages and is available in more than 45 countries. In 1991, he was elected a full member of the Academy of Hebrew Language. In 1992 he was awarded the German Friedenspreis, an international peace prize. In 1997, he received the French Cross of the Knight of the Legion d'Honneur for his work, and he was awarded the Israel Prize in 1998.
Since 1977, Oz has been an active member of Peace Now and has written more than 450 essays and articles about social and political issues. "Love and Darkness" loops around his political views, making clear his deep love for the land, his sympathies with both Palestinian and Jew and his understanding of the endemic differences that plague them.
His views are colored by personal experience. Vivid memories, recounted in his memoir, of the last days of the British mandate, and a compelling recounting of the precarious vote for statehood and the difficult days of the war that followed are suffused with deep emotion, even now. Interestingly, there is only passing reference to Oz's military service. He served in the army in both the 1967 and 1973 wars. Oz confided in a recent New Yorker profile that reflecting on war is too painful, even for a writer whose work is grounded in both his, and Israel's, history.
Oz speaks of being an acute observer, applying his active imagination and literary power to what he sees in the world around him. He tells of being in line at the grocery store or post office and wondering who is the person in front of him, conjuring up a story line as he waits his turn to be served. He describes his meticulous methods, using scraps of paper to jot down words, phrases, ideas, then arranging and rearranging them, honing his narrative as he polishes each word, refines each phrase.
There is only one photograph in "Love and Darkness," an arresting shot of Oz as a boy, his beautiful dark-haired mother and bespectacled father.
It appears toward the end of the book, where Oz painfully retells his mother's last days and comes face to face with the forces that drive his writing.
He writes, "I understood where I had come from."
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