An uneasy glance backward
Novelist Amos Oz reassesses the rifts in his life, nation
A Tale of Love
and Darkness
By Amos Oz
Translated, from the Hebrew, by Nicholas de Lange
Harcourt, 538 pp., $26
An Israeli Robert Frost might have reversed his celebrated line to read "We were the land's before the land was ours." A certainty about belonging; a doubt about possessing.
Take the writer Amos Oz, one of his country's masters of unease. For him as for A. B. Yehoshua, another of Israel's great novelists, moral ambivalence has been the surge, the creative energy, that love supplied to whole centuries of poets. The passion of their people, so brilliantly rendered, is fueled by its own self-disputing; the triumph of arrival perpetually under question by the departure or repression of the Arab others.
History is written by the winners, but these writers insist upon jogging the pen. Long active in the Peace Now movement, Oz is called a dove, yet this is too simple to take account of his intellectual and artistic complexities. A pelican is more like it, the bird mythologically said to pierce its own breast.
Oz writes that two peoples with a common oppressor may shift that oppressor's image onto each other. "When the Arabs look at us, they see not a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication, and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East," he writes. "And when we look at them, we do not see fellow victims either; we see not brothers in adversity but pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise."
The lines appear in "A Tale of Love and Darkness," a memoir that, as the title suggests, embodies Oz's sense of internal rift. Some of that sense is devoted to public matters. Mostly it sunders a story of two brainy but fragile parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe, of their overstimulated little boy -- Maurice Sendak might have drawn him -- and of the cramped basement apartment in Jerusalem where they collided and side-slipped through one another's feelings, like unmoored planets in a ruptured solar system.
Arieh Klausner, father of Amos (who chose Oz for a pen name and for distance), was a disappointed scholar who failed to get an academic post and had to settle to work in the National Archives. Fania, his mother, was a woman of quicksilver imagination but depressive temperament who told little Amos fairy tales set in the forests of her youth. To her European sensibility, the bare Palestine landscape was imaginative starvation; for Amos, "meadow" was a word of myth and magic.
She read voraciously; so did her son, who decided at 5 to grow up to be a book. Not a writer, a book -- a foreboding insight, the grown Oz suggests wryly, as he numbers the several million painful decisions that go into the creation of a novel.
The memoir includes a richly extensive account of Oz's aunts and grandparents. There is an especially beguiling portrait of his grandfather Alexander, a butterfly who courted women, and won some, into his 90s. Death, he complains, is more appropriate for the young than the old. Unlike him, they have no time to acquire habits ("habitats," he calls them). "Even to live -- it's a habitat for me, nu, what, after hundred years who can all at once suddenly change all his habitats? Not to get up anymore at five in the morning? No douche, no salt herring with bread? No newspaper no stroll no glass hot chai? Now, that's tragedy!"
As for the darkness as well as the love in the title, it is told in the endemic and growing pain between husband and wife, "the woe" -- from Chaucer's Wife of Bath to Robert Lowell -- "that is in marriage."
Arieh was a polymath, an unstoppable fount of puns, jingles, and shards of information masking a profound evasiveness. "All facts and no truth," Oz writes in one of the cold passages that alternate with burning ones. Fania, nearly wordless outside of the domestic routine, the fairy stories, and a rare prophetic outburst, was more nearly all truth -- concealed by a silence that expanded into suicide by pills when Amos was 12.
It is a painful story, yet transformed, even lightened, by a novelist's ability to get closer while standing back. There is much that is both comic and very human about the contrast between the father's logomanic distances and his disastrously bungling tenderness. Only in Fania's death does distance fail; it is told haltingly.
Oz achieves a splendid portrait of himself as an overliteratured micro-pomposity who, after the suicide, broke with his cloistered upbringing to join a kibbutz. He was determined to get a tan, morph into a brawny, clear-eyed sabra, and renounce the ambition to become a book.
Luckily, he only quite succeeded at the first. Instead, having lived or tried to live the different ways of being Israeli -- both assertive nation-builder and questioning intellectual -- the mature Oz found his voice in his country's rifts and his own.
Richard Eder writes about books for various publications. 