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Amos Oz (1939-2018) |
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Israeli novelist, short-story writer, and essayist who wrote in Hebrew. Amos Oz was often mentioned as a possible Nobel contender. Central themes in his fiction were loneliness, rootlessness, and the tension between inner life, mystical yearning, and outer reality. As a political essayist Oz dealt with major national controversies, Zionism, the relations between Jews and Arabs, and the return of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Oz campaigned for a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza. At the time of the author's death, his books had been translated into nearly fifty languages. "Wherever war is called peace, where oppression and persecution are referred to as security, and assassination is called liberation, the defilement of the language precedes and prepares for the defilement of life and dignity. In the end, the state, the regime, the class or the idea remain intact where human life is shattered. Integrity prevails over the fields of scattered bodies." (from Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays by Amos Oz, New York: Vintage, 1995, p. 2) Amos
Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem into a family of
scholars and teachers. Both of Oz's parents were Zionist immigrants
from Eastern Europe. Yehuda Arieh Klausner, his father, was a librarian
and writer, who spoke eleven languages, and later received his
doctorate from London University. Oz's mother, Fania Mussman, read
seven or eight languages. Mostly Oz's parents read books in German or
English, at home they spoke Russian and Polish, but the only language
they taught him at home was Hebrew. As a child, Oz wrote biblical poems
about the restoration of the David kingdom. At the age of 16, Oz read the New
Testament. The story of Jesus fascinated him ‒ more than playing
basketball or chasing girls in the evenings ‒ and tinged all his
thought. Noteworthy, his great-uncle, Joseph Klausner, had published in
1921 a book, Jesus of Nazareth,
in which he claimed that Jesus never aimed at establishing a new
religion; he was born a Jew and died a Jew. Oz's mother, who had suffered from depression, committed
suicide in
1952; she was 38 years old. "For every true writer becomes a writer
because of a profound trauma experienced in youth or childhood," Oz
has said. (The
Silence of Heaven: Agnon's Fear of God, 1993, p. 3).
After his father remarried, Oz left home -
"walked out on the good manners and the scholarsip." (The Amos Oz Reader, edited by Nitza
Ben-Dov, 2009 p. 359) To make a new start in life, away from
Jerusalem, he settled at the Kibbutz
Hulda and took the surname Oz, a Hebrew word meaning "strenght"
or "courage." "For several years I worked a bit on the land and took my
lessons in a free socialist classroom, where we sat barefooted all day
long learning about the source of human evil, the corruption of
societies, the origins of the Jewish disease, and how to overcome all
these by means of labor, simple living, sharing, and equality, a
gradual improvement of human nature." (ibid, p. 360) In 1960 Oz married Nily Zuckerman, the daughter of the librarian of the kibbutz. Between 1957 and 1960 Oz served in the Israeli Army. In the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War Oz fought as a reserve soldier with a tank unit. Oz received his B.A. in Hebrew literature and philosophy in 1963 from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he was sent by the General Assembly of the kibbutz. After graduating, Oz worked as a teacher of literature and philosophy at Hulda High School and Regional High School, Givat Brenner. Where the Jackals Howl, Oz's first collection of short
stories, appeared in 1965. Its provocative opening story,
'Nomad and Viper,' has been compared to E.M. Forster's A Passage to
India (924). This book was followed by a novel about kibbutz
life, Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966). Oz's breakthrough as a writer came with My
Michael
(1968), a story about a young woman, Hannah Gonen, who tries to find a
way out of her bourgeois life and marriage through self-destructive
fantasies. At the end she imagines sending her childhood friends, Arab
twins, on a commando raid on a farm. The psychological novel was an
international
bestseller but also created controversy, which he would face in the
future too. "The political implications are not hard to unravel: Amos
Oz is suggesting that in her heart Israel is going mad dreaming of
Arabs, while on the surface emotionally stunted "new Israelis" are
going about their nation's business cut off from self and history." ('Books of the Times' by Richard Locke, The New York Times, May 25, 1972) While
living on the kibbutz, Oz did his share of manual labor,
carried trays into the dining room, drove the tractor, farmed, and
taught in the kibbutz school. Royalties from his publications went into
the general coffers. Moreover, many of his kibbutz stories were written
in the collective persona, often with an ironic edge. In the
beginning of his literary career, Oz wrote
in his spare time, mostly in the hours before sunrise. His books were
published by the Labor Party press, Am Oved. With his growing renown in the literary world, Oz was allowed to devote more of his time to writing. He once defended the kibbutz as having "a social system that, for all its disadvantages, is the least bad, the least unkind, that I have seen anywhere." ('The Kibbutz at the Present Time,' in Under This Blazing Light, 1995, p. 128). Oz's characters are torn between forces and conflict of motives - their own desires and social reality,
irrational
impulses and obsessions. In A Perfect Peace(1982)
a young man leaves his home, the secure world of the kibbutz,
but do not survive in the desert without the help of a female soldier
and an old man. Eventually, after misadventures, he returns to his
house to live a quiet life. Patience and compromise are the keys to
the stability of Oz's characters. What becomes of fanaticism, he has
remarked that life has made him an expert in it. Due to Oz's
conciliatory attitude toward the Palestinians, the nationalist right
labelled him as a betrayer of his people. "For me the word
"compromise" means life. And the opposite of compromise is not
idealism, not devolution; the opposite of compromise is fanaticism and
death." (How to Cure
a Fanatic, foreword by Nadine Gordimer, 2010, p. 8) When
dealing with the Israeli-Palentine conflict, Oz felt that as a
storyteller, he could live, perhaps more easily than others, with the
two mutually exclusive narratives of the tragedy: in his stories
different characters express different views on the same subject. The experimental Black Box (1987), which was also a bestseller, consisted of letters between members of a broken family, revealing through their voices personal anguishes, as well the diverse realities of Israeli life. From book to book, the burden of past is always present, but Oz's fiction is decidedly contemporary in its concerns. History is biography, he argued. In the memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002) Oz explored the traumatic effect of his mother's death on his life and writing. Immediately
after the Six Day War in 1967, Oz started his career as a political
essayist with an article deprecating the use of
the term "liberated territories". Although he was born in Jerusalem, he
could not rejoice in the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem: "My dreams
had deceived me," he later confessed. After the battle, which took the
Old City from the Jordanians, Oz walked through its streets but without
any fulfillment; insted he saw "enmity and rebelliousness, sycophancy,
amazement, fear, insult
and trickery." (Governing
Jerusalem: Again on the World's Agenda by Ira Sharkansky, 1996,
p. 28) Since choosing kibbutz life, Oz had never resided in
Jerusalem. He also
kept his distance because the city had been taken over by all kinds of
extremists, Muslims, religious Jews, and nationalists - it was a metropolis full of tensions, not the
small town with many neighbourhoods, which he so well remembered. In the Land of Israel (1983), a collection of essays based on interviews made in the aftermath of the Lebanon War in 1982, Oz examined the past and present of his country. Originally the essays appeared in the newspaper Davar. Viewing with suspicion the ideals of the founders of modern Israel, Oz concluded: "Perhaps we should have aimed for less. Perhaps there was a wild pretension here, beyond our capabilities - beyond human capabilities. Perhaps we must limit ourselves and forgo the rainbow of messianic dreams. . . ." Oz also published a number of essays on literary criticism, especially on the work of S.Y. Agnon, whom Oz regards as one of his literary mentors. In The Story Begins (1995) Oz analyzed how such writers as Gogol, Kafka Chekhov, García Márquez, and Raymond Carver open their stories. Oz was a founding member of the Peace Now movement in 1977 and
advocated the idea of an exchange of land for peace. "What we require
is a divorce between Israel and the Palestinians, followed by the
partitioning of a very small apartment," Oz stated in 1991 in an
interview (The New York Times, April 14, 1991). Before becoming a supporter of Meretz, a left wing social
democratic
party, Oz had close connections with the Israeli Labor Party and its
leader Shimon Peres. In an article written for the Los Angeles
Times in July 2006, Oz supported the Israeli army in its war with
Hezbollah in Lebanon, but in August, along with A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, Oz urged the Israeli Prime
Minister to reach a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah
forces. Following President Bashar Assad's brutal crackdown on the country's uprising, Oz and other writers, such as Umberto Eco, David Grossman, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, and Wole Soyinka, urged in June 2011 the United Nations to condemn the repression in Syria as a crime against humanity. In December 2014, Oz, David Grossman and other prominent Israelis signed a petion for the recognition of a Palestinian state. "Jewish continuity has always hinged on uttered and written words, on an expanding maze of interpretations, debates, and disagreements, and on a unique human rapport. In synagogue, at school, and most of all in the home, it has always involved two or three generations deep in conversation." (Jews and Words by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, 2012, p. 1) Oz lived on the kibbutz until he moved with his family in 1986
to
Arad, in the south of Israel. Oz was a visiting fellow at the St.
Cross College, Oxford (1969-70), a writer-in-residence or visiting
professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1975), the University of
California, Berkeley (1980), the Colorado College, Colorado Springs
(1984-85), Boston University (1987), and the Hebrew University,
Jerusalem (1990). In 1987 Oz was appointed professor of Hebrew
literature at the Ben Gurion University, Beer-Sheva. Oz's many awards
include the Holon Prize (1965), the Israel-American Cultural Foundation
Award (1968), the B'nai B'rith award (1973), the Brenner prize (1976),
the Ze'ev award for children's books (1978), the Bernstein prize
(1983), the Bialik prize (1986), the H.H. Wingate award (1988), Prix
Femina Étranger (1988), the German Publishers' Union international
peace prize (1992), the French cross of the Knight of the Légion
d'Honneur (1997), the Israel Prize for Literature (1998), and the
Goethe Prize in 2005. Amos Oz died in Tel Aviv, on December 28, 2018,
after a short battle with cancer. For further reading: Voices of Israel by Joseph Cohen (1990); Between God and Beast: an Examination of Amos Oz's Prose by Avraham Balaban (1993); 'Oz, Amos,' in Contemporary World Writers, edited by Tracy Chevalier (1993); 'Oz, Amos,' in Encyclopedia of World Authors in the 20th Century, Voluime 3, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Somber Lust: the Art of Amos Oz by Yair Mazor (2002); 'In Conflicts, Few People Are Able to Understand the Suffering of Others / Amos Oz,' in Literature and War: Conversations with Israeli and Palestinian Writers by Runo Isaksen (2009); 'Zionist Places against the Desert Wilderness: Amos Oz,' in Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature by Karen Grumberg (2011); Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film by Ranen Omer-Sherman (2015); Amos Oz: The Legacy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond, edited by Ranen Omer-Sherman (2023); Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon by Robert Alter (2023); Pragmatic-psychoanalytic Interpretations of Amos Oz's Writings: Words Significantly Uttered by Dorit Lemberger (2023) Selected works:
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