Left Jerusalem following his mother's suicide. Oz
צילום: איציק בירן
Oz says country's existence not at risk
In exclusive interview, renowned writer Amos Oz talks about autobiographical novel, love, tragedy, the Zionist ethos, Israeli-Palestinian conflict
ARAD - Amos Oz's autobiographical novel, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” might well be the best of his books so far.
In this novel, Oz depicts the childhood years of Amos Klausner, who was born in 1939 in the rather depressing atmosphere of Jewish Jerusalem in the 1940s.
The book also portrays the life stories of Oz's parents and grandparents, as well as the collective biography of those European Jews who were forced to flee their beloved and dangerous Europe and establish a nation in a foreign land.
א.ב יהושע עמוס עוז (צילום: שאול גולן)
“Love and Darkness,” which Oz calls “a letter from the dead to the living,” is a huge success in Israel and Europe.
Hopefully, the novel's foreign audience will be fascinated by the tale of a family living in the early days of the Jewish state and the circumstances under which Israel was born.
Mr. Oz, in 1954, two years after the suicide of your mother Fania, you left Jerusalem to live on a kibbutz. You changed your name then from Amos Klausner to Amos Oz. Did you choose the name “Oz,” (strength) because you felt then rather afraid, weak, unsure of yourself?
Oz means courage, strength, determination; everything I needed very badly and didn’t have when I left my home at 14 or 15 to join a kibbutz.
Did you become Amos Oz in the meantime?
Yes, I did. But I am now fully aware, that Amos Oz is kind of pregnant with Amos Klausner. He contains him. The idea I had at 14 or 15, that one can be completely born again, change identity, erase the past, become a different human being, is a comical idea. And I write about it with a certain irony and detachment. It cannot be done; no human being can be born again.
Nevertheless, it is very typical of the collective biography of the early Zionists, as they not only dreamt of forming a nation, but also longed for a personal rebirth, if you will, when they got rid of the diaspora names and gave themselves Hebrew names.
Yes, this was definitely part of the Zionist ethos. It is a complicated ethos, because part of it is based on a certain acceptance of anti-Jewish and even anti-Semitic cliches. “If everybody hated us Jews for so many centuries, in so many different places, for so many different reasons, then there must be, after all, something wrong with us, and we have to change in order to be loved.”
These things have never been pronounced in such a way, but it was obviously part of the ethos. Now, when I rebelled against my father's world, trying to become, almost to emerge, as the archetype of the new, tough, uncomplicated, bronzed Israeli, I was partly fulfilling one of his deepest wishes, which again prooves the irony in the dialectics of every rebellion.
When reading your description of Jerusalem in the 1940s, I got the impression that life was similar to life in the Diaspora; the reader gets a very gloomy and quite depressing picture of life in Jerusalem.
The Jewish Jerusalem of the 1940s was a refugee camp. For many of the Jerusalemites, it was not a matter of conscious choice and preference to move to the new country. It was a life raft for people who were not wanted anywhere else in these years. People tend to ask themselves, wether Israel was a good option or maybe not the optimal option for the Jewish people, if some other options would have been better. But they forget that there were hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing from European anti-Semitism. In the 1930s they were absolutely not wanted anywhere. In these years, this country was the only life raft. But this entails sadness, because there was the pain and insult of unrequited love for Europe.
There was the shock and dread of the mass murder of the Jews in Europe, and there was the fear, a very deep and sincere fear, that just about the same thing was going to happen to the Jewish community here, once the British pulled out.
There was also the fear, in the ‘40s, than the Germans might seize Palestine.
Yes, during the ‘40s there was apparently a very real danger, not just a fear, but a real danger, that both from North Africa and from the Caucasus, the Panzers would conquer Palestine. So all of this was very real then, and of course, parents would not share these fears with a child. It was hush-hushed and censored, but I guess that as a young boy, I could receive this from the air; it was full of fear, actually, full of death.
Your parent's flat was full of books, but the reader somehow gets the impression that despite all these hundreds of thousands of printed words, there was a certain lack of communication in your family.
Apparently there was a lack of communication, and there is an enigma there about the marriage of two very good, generous, gentle, well meaning, civilized people. They hoped for each other’s welfare. And yet, this colossal tragedy happened.
My mother killed herself, my father declined, their child was left alone in the world. This was the enigma that got me going when I started writing the book. How could such a thing happen. How could good, plus good, result in great evil? I have to confess, that in the course of writing I completely lost interest in this enigma. If anyone is to read the book hoping to find out on the last page who was the murderer or the bad guy, they should not even start the book. This is, by the way, where my literary work and my political work carry certain similarities.
ירושלים צילום אוויר של ירושלים המזרחית והמערבית. הכותל והשכונות הסמוכות (צילום: איי אף פי)
I do not have much interest in black and white conflicts, and I do not have much interest in collisions between villains and victims, although there are such collisions, many, and I recognize them. But they are less interesting to me. I am much more interested in the conflict between victim and victim, which is the way I view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and which is the way I view the tragic conflict between my parents.
I grew up in a house not only full of books, but full of good intentions, and idealism, and tenderness, and all of that was not sufficient to prevent a colossal tragedy. How and why it happened I do not know, but I did capture it, in as great detail and accuracy as I could, and also with compassion and irony and humor, and empathy and curiosity, which took over from the urge to find out who caused the tragedy.
Another example of a tragic result caused by good intentions is depicted in the scene where the boy Amos climbs up a tree to impress the girl and causes a catastrophe.
Well, this is it. The love of this boy for, or his infatuation, with a Palestinian Arab girl. She is a few years older than he, obviously provocative and manipulative. The boy, on the other side, is macho and stupid. So here you have a micro-example of the same thing: a love that ends in darkness. I could say the same about the love of my entire family for Europe: It was a one-sided love, an unwanted love, which ended in tragedy. I could say this about the relationship between my parents, a love that ended in darkness.
By the way, not all loves end in darkness. The love for books binds all the characters in this novel, the older and the younger generation, neighbours, teachers, everyone. This love is celebrated throughout “A Tale Of Love And Darkness,” and it has a happy ending, because here is another book produced by this love of books, by this bookish world.
Some days ago I spoke with Yoram Kaniuk. He told me he doesn’t believe that Israel is going to survive. Could it be, that all the good intentions the founding fathers of Israel had might end finally in darkness? Can you understand Kaniuk's disbelief in the future of the state?
Yes, I understand his fear and sadness. But I don’t think Israel today confronts the kind of existential threat that it confronted in his early years, except in the very broad context of some global nuclear or other calamity.
In Europe there is a process of ideological delegitimization of Israel going on, but, after all, we are not at war with Europe. And whether Europe loves Israel or not matters to me a great deal, but it is not an existential danger to Israel. If Europe should decide that Israel does not deserve to exist, this would be very embarassing and nasty. But it would not pose an immediate threat to Israel’s existence. Gone are the days when if we were not loved our life was in danger.
