The nature of Amos Oz

Depending on who you talk to, Amos Oz is either a national treasure or a subversive.

For nearly 50 years, he has been both Israel’s greatest admirer and its most outspoken critic, and has polarised popular opinion in the country as a result.

His novels are taught as part of the Israeli school curriculum and are entrenched in the national psyche, while his political seditiousness has seen him coopted and attacked by both left and right-leaning groups.

A new documentary, Amos Oz: The Nature Of Dreams, opens in Australia this week, and the makers of the film, Israeli husband and wife directing team Masha Zur Glozman and Yonatan Zur, make no bones about‚Ä®which camp they’re in.

Their film is an unabashed love letter to the contentious literary figure, and frames Oz as Israel’s ambassadorial voice of reason.

In 2002, Masha penned a letter to Oz after reading his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, detailing how deeply it affected her, but she never sent it. Years later, Masha and Yonatan approached Oz about making their documentary, and in early 2008, shooting got underway. “I wrote the letter but I never sent it, so this documentary, in a way, is this letter extended,” Masha said this week, in a phone interview from Israel.

“[A Tale of Love and Darkness] really moved us and made us think more about our collective identity and personal identity and the connection between them. For a long time we felt an urge to even just talk with Amos Oz and a documentary is a great excuse to talk with someone you really want to talk to.”

In the first scene of the film, Oz is sitting at the desk in his cluttered office, with books bursting out of packed shelves in the background. His feet are up on his desk and he is doing an interview with a journalist. On hanging up the phone, Oz says he doesn’t like to do interviews because it forces him to be “quick, like in ping pong”.

“We didn’t really believe him when he said that,” Yonatan says of Oz’s self-effacement. He is, after all, one of the most interviewed men in Israel.

“What interested us was abstract ideas and thinking,” Masha adds. We wanted to know more about his insight than his personal life and his family life. So I think from the beginning he was more open, because he felt secure.”

And as with the man himself, the film straddles the line between philosophy and politics adroitly. The filmmakers concurrently chronicle Oz’s life growing up in Palestine, the son of Eastern European immigrants, and the evolution of Israel and its people.

Oz’s voice can be heard throughout, reading passages from A Tale of Love and Darkness and Under this Blazing Sun, a collection of essays‚Ä®he wrote in the 1960s. The combination of the poetry in Oz’s voice and the archival footage of a bygone Israel is a heady and, at times, mesmerising mix.

Oz reads deeply personal excerpts from A Tale of Love and Darkness about his parents failed marriage and the eventual suicide of his mother when he was 12. He speaks as well about his strained relationship with his father, who he also paints as a tragic figure.

He recounts his time on a kibbutz when by his own admission, he was a “fiercely chauvinistic” poet, and tells how his writing changed when his romantic views of the Jewish State were eroded.

But Oz’s political side — in the 2009 general elections in Israel, he campaigned for the Zionist social democratic party Meretz — is never far from the surface.

In the film, we see Oz take Israeli President Shimon Peres aside at a function during the 2008 meeting of the UN General Assembly to counsel him on how to respond to a rant by Iranian head of state Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Speak to the Iranian people above Ahmadinejad’s head,” he pleads. “Say that we have great respect for the Iranian people’s culture.”

Masha and Yonatan follow Oz as he speaks at countless engagements around the globe, including Austria and Germany, where he is vocal on his views about Europe and the “tiny continent’s” attitude toward Israel and it’s historic treatment of Jews.

In one of the film’s most poignant moments, Oz is stopped in the street by a German man, who breaks down as he recounts the experiences of his family during World War II.

“This is one of the amazing things that can happen to you on a documentary,” Yonatan says. “The man found out we were from Israel, but he didn’t even know who Amos Oz was, he just started telling stories. Amos didn’t know how to respond. He said he wanted to tell him something, but he left.”

But whatever Oz’s own political leanings — he has been spruiking a two-state solution since the Six-Day War in 1967 — the 70-year-old is considered, calm, persuasive and profoundly insightful at times.

“Wherever he went, audiences were captivated”, Masha says. “They adore him, even in Austria and Germany, the audiences were hanging on every word he said and just enjoying his eloquence. I think he is most controversial in Israel.”

ADAM KAMIEN