Master of words
 
WINNER of the 1998 Israel Prize for Literature, Amos Oz is Israel’s most celebrated living writer.¬†The Oz Archive in Ben-Gurion University, where Oz holds the Agnon Chair for for Modern Hebrew Literature, boasts more than 25,000 articles on his impressive harvest of 37 books translated into 36 languages.¬†
His essays have consolidated his position as Israel’s most persuasive spokesperson on the Middle East.¬†
Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Newsweek described him as a “Zionist Orwell: a complex man passionate about simple decency and determined, above all, to tell the truth regardless of whom it offends”. ¬†Likewise, The Washington Post observed that: “Countries need writers as their voices of conscience few have them. Israel is one of the few. It has Amos Oz.”¬†
Oz has won countless awards,¬† including The French Cross of the Knight of the Legion d’Honneur, the German Goethe Prize and a slew of honorary doctorates.¬†Oz was born Amos Klausner on May 4, 1939, in Jerusalem, to an extended family of intellectuals. At the age of 14, after the suicide of his mother, he left home to join Kibbutz Hulda.¬†
There, in a dramatic act of self-definition, he changed his name to Oz. In the 1960s he published his first stories, while working the cotton fields and teaching in the kibbutz high school. In 1986, Oz and his family left the kibbutz for Arad. Oz has seen the perils and calamities of war, and in 1967, he was one of the first to call on the Israeli government to withdraw from the territories. Since then he has been an active campaigner for the Peace Now Movement, which he helped establish. 
In Israel, Palestine and Peace he wrote: “I think that Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy in the exact sense of the word. It is a clash between one very powerful and another no less powerful.” A persuasive advocate of religious tolerance, he signed up as a member of the Reform movement, but has also called for a spiritual secular Shabbat.
Oz also noted: “If I have to say in one word what my entire literary work is all about, I would say families. If I had two words, I would say unhappy families. If I had more than two words, you would have to read my works.”¬†Thematically, Oz explores the divisions within Israeli society, depicting the conflict between religion and secularism, Left and Right, socialist Zionism and the new generation, community and individuality, the destructiveness of anti-Semitism on the hater and the hated, and the shifting border between the real and imaginary. ¬†
His books reveal the ideological currents that pulsate through Israel and the passions that sustain its people. But he also weaves a cosmic quilt that reveals the deep recesses of the human landscape.¬†Oz’s first book, an anthology of stories Where The Jackals Howl, was published in 1965. The stories focus on kibbutz life and the land of Israel itself, windswept and bare, becomes the main character.
Oz’s first novel Elsewhere Perhaps appeared in 1966. It was an anatomy of a frontier kibbutz on the Syrian border, and was it lauded by a critic who said he knew of no other book that portrayed life on a kibbutz more vividly or with greater insight.¬†In his debut collection of essays Under this Blazing Light, in 1979, Oz writes of the kibbutz, as “the least bad place I have ever seen. And the most daring effort.” He returned to the kibbutz in A Perfect Peace (1982).¬†
My Michael in 1968 catapulted the 29-year-old to the international literary stage. The psychological profile of a young, married woman escaping from a life of boredom to a delusional universe involving Arab characters took Israel by storm and became a bestseller. 
My Michael echoes many of the descriptions contained in Oz’s autobiographical essay, An Alien City, which speaks of a metaphorical and literal Jerusalem that is frightening and magical. Echoes of Oz’s childhood in Jerusalem are also revealed in his 1976 work, The Hill of Evil Counsel.¬†In 1982, Oz published In the Land of Israel, a collection of interviews with a variety of Israelis and Arabs.¬†
Oz displayed his stylistic dexterity with the 1988 publication of Black Box. Set in 1976, the allegorical novel consists of a string of letters exchanged between the various characters. It earned Oz France’s highest literary accolade, the Prix Femina Etranger.¬†Oz’s trilogy of inter-connected novels published in the ’80s and ’90s — To Know A Woman, The Third Condition and Don’t Call it Night — revolve around characters who experience a major shift in their priorities.¬†
The heroes are concerned with ordinary things, such as household chores or tending the garden, rather than making grand political statements. In A Panther in the Basement (1995), Oz sets his story in 1947 Jerusalem, around a 12-year-old Proffy, who is accused of treason because of his friendship with the British Sergeant Stephen Dunlop.  
Oz plunged into autobiographical and psychological waters in the poetic novel The Same Sea (1999) and the memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002). Daringly, The Same Sea does away with conventional storytelling, with Oz employing a series of prose poems to reflect on the themes of loss, memory and familial tensions. 
In the monumental A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz takes on the mantle of family and national historian, giving his readers a crafted epic of childhood in Jerusalem, but also opening a window to Jewish-European, Zionist and Israeli history.¬†Readers learn of his mother’s descent into depression as well as the famous personalities he met as a youngster, the neighbourhood he grew up in and his troubled rise to international stature. Natalie Portman is set to make her directorial debut with the film adaptation of this memoir.¬†
Oz’s latest novella to be translated into English is Rhyming Life and Death, a slim work of satire that takes readers into the mind of an unnamed Israeli author during a hot night in Tel Aviv.¬†When Oz was awarded the German Publishers Association’s International Peace Prize, Zigfried Lantz said: “With compassion, bitterness, sorrow, sharpness and humour, he tells us about people destined to carry the mysteries of life and its contradictions.¬†By doing so, he brings to the surface reasons that cause us restlessness, but at the same time hint at the possibility of a perfect peace.”
 
Photo:   Amos Oz   Photo by: AJN file