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Introducing a tale of love and darkness Translated by: Nicholas de Lange Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide, a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen and joins a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel. A story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.
A tale of love and darkness A review http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/05/1099547374632.html?from=storyrhs&oneclick=true It is not every day that one of the world's master storytellers turns the microscope on himself and unflinchingly examines the wellsprings of his personal and creative life. Amos Oz, Israel's best-known and possibly most accomplished novelist and political essayist, has done just that in this superbly crafted and profoundly moving memoir. His mother's suicide, when he was just 12 years old, is the harrowing "tale of darkness" that lies at the core of Oz's story. It left him hurt, angry, betrayed and, above all, full of guilt and self-loathing: "All mothers love their children," he writes, "that's a law of nature. Even a cat or a goat. Even mothers of criminals and murderers. Even mothers of Nazis. . . . The fact that only I couldn't be loved, that my mother had run away from me, only proved that there was nothing in me to love, that I didn't deserve love." Fortunately for Oz, he was not engulfed by that darkness, nor has he allowed it to cloud his work. Indeed, there is a great deal more love than darkness, both in his fiction and in this life-affirming memoir. AdvertisementAdvertisement Characteristically, he learned to recognise that this "old Jew/new Jew" dichotomy is a false one. Indeed, it is a leitmotif that runs through Oz's work that obsession with polarity of any kind - Israel/Diaspora, Jew/Arab, and even, perhaps especially, man/woman - is both reductive and destructive. His task as a writer is to explore the common ground, to seek the self in the other, the other in the self. We meet dozens of marvellous characters, each drawn with the economy, insight and gentle irony that are hallmarks of Oz's storytelling. His mother Fania, hardly surprisingly, occupies centre stage as, seeking the roots of his family tragedy, Oz traces the trajectory that took her from her idealistic girlhood in an increasingly hostile Poland to the dark basement flat in Jerusalem where she sunk deeper and deeper into her final, fatal depression. She is portrayed as the tragic victim of a failed, perhaps impossible, Zionist dream: "My mother grew up surrounded by an angelic cultural vision of misty beauty whose wings were finally dashed on a hot dusty pavement of Jerusalem stone." Poles apart from his tragic mother is his wife of 45 years, Nily - the vivacious, always-singing epicentre of light and joy in his life: "the clapper in the bell" - who he met on the kibbutz and who restored and has sustained his belief in the capacity to love, and be loved. Then there is his Grandma Shlomit, who took one horrified look at the hot, dirty, smelly, raucous Palestine she arrived in as a reluctant refugee in 1933, and pronounced: "The Levant is full of germs." For the rest of her life she doused everything with Lysol and took three hot baths a day to keep the germ-filled Levant at bay; she died some 25 years later - in her bath! As if there weren't any germs in the Europe she had escaped from, Oz comments wryly, "not to mention all sorts of other noxious things". There are some moments of high farce, as when Oz recounts how Menachem Begin, former leader of the Irgun underground and hero of his staunchly right-wing family, complained at a public meeting in Jerusalem, shortly after Israel was born, that while the world was rushing to "arm" the new state's Arab enemies, no one was willing to "arm" Israel. "If only I were prime minister today," Begin declaimed, "everyone, everyone, would be arming us! Ev-ery-one!!!" Unfortunately, Begin, who had learnt his somewhat bombastic Hebrew in his native Poland, used the archaic word "lezayen" for the verb "to arm". To young Amos's ears, attuned to the much less formal vernacular Hebrew of his native-born generation, the word lezayen had another meaning entirely: "to fuck". To the horror of his family, as silence descended on the hall, he burst into uncontrollable laughter and his mortified grandfather had to drag him out by his ear. So ended any attachment Oz might have had to his family's right-wing political allegiances. Much more sombre is his harrowing account of another epiphany: a childhood visit to the home of a prominent Arab family, the Silwanis, in east Jerusalem. The young Amos, then about eight, was sent out to play in the garden with the children. Conscious of his role as representative of the Jewish People Come Home to Zion, he was determined to demonstrate to his Arab hosts - especially the comely 12-year-old Aisha and her little brother Awwad - what a fine fellow he was. He regaled them with his culture and erudition, reciting the poems of Zionism's leading poets (including one of his own) before going on to demonstrate that this New Jew could not only recite poetry, but could climb trees, too. "Trembling with the thrill of national representativity," he scaled the large mulberry tree in the Silwani garden. At the top he found an old iron ball attached to a rusty chain. Grabbing hold of the chain, he whirled the ball in wild circles around his head, whooping loudly. "Now at last was muscular Judaism taking the stage, making resplendent new Hebrew youth at the height of his powers, making everyone who sees him tremble at his roar; like a lion among lions." Then disaster struck. The rusty chain snapped and the heavy iron ball hurtled earthward. It just missed smashing the skull of three-year-old Awwad, but slammed into his foot, crushing it. Oz remembers little of the mayhem that followed, but indelibly etched in his consciousness was the look of "loathing, despair, horror and flashing hatred" that the little boy's sister, Aisha, gave him. The seed was sown of his deep and abiding revulsion for chauvinism of any sort - that mindless, corrosive national self-assertiveness that denies the other and crushes not only the body but the soul of victim and perpetrator alike. Ultimately, Oz is, above all else, a wonderfully perceptive and sensitive chronicler of human emotion - something he can capture and convey in a few simple words. Thus his touching description of how he reacts when his wife Nily responds favourably to his work: "When she likes something, she looks up from the page and gives me a certain look, and the room gets bigger." So too, when one reads a book like this, does the reader's. David Bernstein is letters editor of The Age.
A review
An elegiac theme runs through the work like a dark thread. The author?s mother committed suicide when he was a teenager, prompting his withdrawal from his father and his entry into the seductive life of the kibbutzim. He even affected a name change after his mother?s death, almost as though by eliminating himself, some sin would be expiated. His mother was a fey, bright person who played words games with her brilliant only child and encouraged him to write. His father was an intellectual and a writer, but so emotionally closed off that after his wife?s death he never mentioned her name again. The son learned to speak in parables, and did indeed fulfill the destiny his mother had mapped out for him. From his father, the child learned order and morality. Oz describes how on the eve of the birth of the state of Israel, in a rare moment of tenderness, his father lay beside his eight-year-old boy and told him in a whisper ?what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some Gentile boys did to him at his Polish School on Vilna, and the girls joined in too.? When his Grandfather came to school to complain, the children set upon him, too, subjecting him to the same humiliation ?and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes?while the teachers watched and said nothing, or maybe they were laughing too.? From that day forward, Oz?s father promised, his son would not be bullied just because he was a Jew. ?From tonight that?s finished here. Forever.? His mother taught him that ?a book would never abandon you?even it was a book you had abandoned and erased from your heart for years and years, it would never disappoint you.? Hardworking but oversensitive, his mother grew dreamier and less associated with reality. Her husband?s family labeled her neurotic and selfish, causing her to retreat even farther. Her lonely husband dared to go out on his own in the evenings, earning the disrespect of her family. Her death is the saddest and final page of this evocative chronicle, the moment the reader longs to understand but never wants to experience, as Oz himself did not. The book leaps from Jerusalem, pre- and post-statehood, and the final days of World War II; to pre-war Europe and the pogroms; from the Jewish fears of offending the Gentiles to their triumph in establishing a homeland; from a boy?s first successes and romances to his unbearable guilt and anger at the death of his beloved mother; his attempt to flee from the old world of intellectualism to the manly pursuits of the kibbutz, and his redemption through writing.
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