The Amos Oz reader /

AMOS OZ has been obsessed with the land and the state of Israel and the city of Jerusalem - where he was born in 1939 - for all his writing life. Oz once wrote that he loved Jerusalem "as one loves a disdainful woman," but he has often reproved what he loves. A lifelong Zionist, he is also a staunch advocate of a twostate solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he has characterized as a clash of "right against right" and, more recently, as "wrong against wrong." His views have made him controversial in Israel, even as his writing (most recently the haunting memoir "A Tale of Love and Darkness," set mostly in the Jerusalem of his boyhood), has made him beloved. "My stories and my articles," he admitted long ago, "have often unleashed a storm of public fury against me." That said, Oz's views are hard to pigeonhole - and they are not immutable. In 2006, he backed Israel's war with Lebanon, then called for a cease-fire. He also resists literary classification. "I do not believe there is any such thing as a 'kibbutz literature,'" he has argued, although his own impressions of kibbutz life provide indelible evidence of the genre. To maintain this degree of self-definition, Oz has removed himself from Israel's publishing hubs, settling first on a kibbutz and later in the small desert town of Arad. "If I lived in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv," he wrote, a decade into his career, "it is very doubtful whether I would manage to elude the grip of the 'literary world,' in which writers and academics and critics and poets sit around discussing each other." And yet, in his new book, a slight but evocative novella called "Rhyming Life and Death," beautifully translated by Nicholas de Lange, Oz thrusts his protagonist into the midst of just such a self-conscious scene. Stepping away from the ferment of faith and politics, he invites the reader to saunter through the jaded reflections and sexy day-dreams of an unnamed Israeli literary lion, identified simply as the Author, who is bored with his fame and bored with his fans but has traveled to Tel Aviv to promote his latest book. The story is set in the early 1980s, and the author is in his mid-40s - the age Oz would have been at the time. Why does he bother coming to such events, the Author wonders, as he wearily anticipates the stock questions his audience will ask him. As he ogles a waitress in a cafe and, later, as he scans his authence from the stage, the Author occupies his mind by imagining detailed fictional lives for the onlookers. The foolish M.C. introduces his guest by citing clichéd lines by an old-fashioned poet, Tsefania BeitHalachmi, from a volume called "Rhyming Life and Death" ("You'll always find them side by side: / never a groom without a bride"), prompting the Author to further mental sidetracks. "The poems in 'Rhyming Life and Death,' as the Author recalls, were not satirical or mordant, but generally addressed the problems of the day with good-natured if somewhat condescending amusement." How is he different, the Author wonders? "He represented the younger generation, the muscular, suntanned native-born sabras, as outwardly tough but dedicated, morally responsible and wonderfully sensitive on the inside." Does Oz mean to invidiously compare himself with the Author, using him to illustrate the dangers of succumbing to the temptation to be an Israeli philosophe? Or might he regard his '80s self as a naïve but purist folk writer, not unlike Beit-Halachmi? These are questions the Author would surely resent, but had they been answered they might have been more engaging than these fertile but unsown ruminations. Fortunately, this novella has been published in conjunction with "The Amos Oz Reader," which brings together excerpts from four decades of Oz's writing, relaying the theme that has haunted him throughout his life. What is this theme? (Apologies to the Author.) It is the understanding of "the other," those upon whom we project emotions and characteristics we think are different from our own - whoever "we" are, whoever "they" are. In Oz's first story collection, "Where the Jackals Howl," published in 1965 and set in the world of the kibbutz, the other could have a familiar face - like the kibbutznik in the title story whose ugliness and lack of fervency made him an outsider in his own community; or the rejected son in the story "The Way of the Wind," from the same collection, a "dark, gentle youth" who joins the paratroopers to impress his hard-line father. Or it could be a kibbutz motormouth spared from ostracism by his gift for truck repair in the novel "A Perfect Peace." But Oz's others can also have more exotic faces. Born to cultured, educated Zionist immigrants from Eastern Europe who had come to the British mandate of Palestine in the 1930s, Oz grew up as an outsider in a city of others. His parents spoke to each other in Russian and Polish, but to their son only in Hebrew. "I was destined to be a new chapter, a plain, tough Israeli, fair-haired and free from Jewish neuroses and excessive intellectualism," he recalled in the essay "An Autobiographical Note," which appeared in his 1975 collection, "Under This Blazing Light." The new chapter took on a painful onus when the boy's mother, sunk in a deep depression, killed herself when Oz was 12. Two years later, he left Jerusalem, moving to Kibbutz Hulda. In the 1968 essay "An Alien City," he recalled his boyhood impression of Jerusalem's inhabitants: "A taciturn, sullen race, always seemingly quelling an inner dread. Devout Jews, Ashkenazim in fur hats, and elderly Sephardim in striped robes." More alien still were the Arab inhabitants, separated from the Jewish community by the mandate's borders: "All my childhood years were spent in the proximity of streets that must not be approached, dangerous alleyways, scars of war damage, no man's land, gun slits in the Arab Legion's fortifications, where occasionally a red Arab headdress could be glimpsed." It was not until 1967, immediately following what Israelis call the Six-Day War, that Oz entered those forbidden precincts. "I visited places that years of dreaming had crystallized as symbols in my mind, and found that they were simply places where people lived," he wrote. "My dreams had deceived me, the nightmares were unfounded." In 2005, Oz traveled to Frankfurt to accept the Goethe Prize, in recognition of his contribution to world literature. He spoke then of how, "even when Goethe was still alive, the spirit of his time was slipping away, becoming the stuff of legend. That is normal; that is the way human life and memory, like human houses and streets, flow and ebb as history moves on." Considering the continuing Israeli-Palestinian struggles, contrasted against the bitter record of World War II, he suggested that "The ultimate evil in the world is not war itself, but aggression." How to fight it? "I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred," he said. "It is, in my view, also a major moral imperative." This charged speech is the final entry in "The Amos Oz Reader," and yet even the darkest chapters in this collection display the simple "deep and very subtle human pleasure" Oz takes, and has always taken, in his imaginative duties. In defining the myriad faces of the other in Israel, he reveals himself again and again as a vigilant watchman over the land. 'The ultimate evil in the world,' Amos Oz said when accepting the Goethe Prize, 'is not war itself, but aggression.' Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

Ben-Dov (Hebrew comparative literature, Univ. of Haifa) collects 19 excerpts spanning the nearly 50-year career of the celebrated Israeli writer and intellectual. Some are from short stories, and others are from Oz's novels, including his first, Elsewhere, Perhaps, as well as such acclaimed works as My Michael, To Know a Woman, and Black Box. The pieces are thematically organized into sections entitled "The Kibbutz," "Jerusalem," "In the Promised Land," and "In an Autobiographical Vein." A moving memoir excerpt recalling Oz's mother's suicide and his acceptance speech of the prestigious Goethe Prize end the collection. Most are from beautiful translations by Nicholas de Lange; all are representative of an intensely poetic writer who is concerned with contemporary life in a conflicted Israel. Oz's subjects come out of his experiences of kibbutz living, war, and the struggles of individuals who are in conflict with Israeli society's ideals. For readers wanting to sample the range of this important international writer, this collection will serve as a fine introduction in public libraries.-Herbert E. Shapiro, Empire State Coll., SUNY-Rochester (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.