Amos Oz

Author

• Born: May 4, 1939
• Birthplace: Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine (now in Israel)
• Died: December 28, 2018
• Place of death: Unknown

Israeli novelist and short-story writer

Identity: Jewish

Biography

Amos Oz, born Amos Klausner, spent the early years of his childhood in his family home in the Jerusalem suburb of Kerem Avraham. The politics of the Klausner family were strongly tied to the idea of a Jewish state in British-mandated Palestine; within the broad spectrum of Zionism, they identified with the right-wing branch, perhaps even with the Revisionist cause led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Following his family’s preferences, Oz attended the Orthodox Jewish school Telkemoni in Jerusalem. The dominating influence of Oz’s father, a member of the urban intellectual middle class and a published scholar of comparative literature, almost certainly played a role in the apparent rebelliousness of the adolescent son. Oz described his father’s character in the following terms: “Like every good Zionist he wanted his offspring to be at least two things: Nimrod the Hunter and the saintly Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav.” In other words, his sons should have the force to fight but should also bring honor to his family.

By the time Oz was fourteen (five years after Israel’s independence), he decided to leave his family home, change his surname from Klausner to Oz, and join Kibbutz Hulda, which had been founded as part of the experimental Zionist community in 1940. There, he gained a new identity living as part of the local agricultural productive force and sharing communal responsibilities with fellow kibbutz members. Many of the themes for his later writings would be based on this grassroots exposure to idealistic Zionism. Another legacy of this decision to change his lifestyle may be visible in his association with the leftist or labor-oriented political philosophy of the party founded by another famous kibbutznik, David Ben-Gurion.

Oz remained a resident of Kibbutz Hulda through the years, leaving only for three years of obligatory service in the Israeli army, two years of study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and several writer’s sabbaticals abroad, including a year as a visiting Fellow of St. Cross College, Oxford, and, from 1986 to 1987, in residence at Colorado College in the United States. Within his own community, his skills as a writer served the needs and interests of the kibbutz youth. When he was not assisting with agricultural labors at harvest time, he taught in the English and literature departments of Kibbutz Hulda’s high school.

Oz’s literary work covers a wide field of interests. Stylistically, it takes advantage of the relative flexibility of modern Hebrew, which was itself reborn along with the Zionist movement of the late nineteenth century, to produce effects that are more difficult to convey in modern European languages. Oz himself likened modern Hebrew to “a volcano in action,” very much like the English language of the Elizabethan period. In terms of subject matter, Oz’s novels provide portraits primarily of Israeli culture and society in some, but certainly not all, cases woven into a cosmopolitan context.

Oz’s Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories (1965) was one of his earliest collections of short stories about kibbutz life. Here, Oz concentrates on individual character studies. Although there is some attention to the potentially hostile surrounding environment, one is struck, particularly in the short story “Nomad and Viper,” by the humanity of Oz’s (somewhat idealized) view of the Arab inhabitants of the territory that became Israel.

Oz’s highly developed stylistic skills are very visible in Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966), a novel about life on the kibbutz of Metsudet Ram. Here, impressions, either of characters or of natural settings, are skillfully encompassed, sometimes into two-page vignettes which stand by themselves. Oz’s Unto Death (1971) consists of two novella-length pieces. One of these is historical fiction dealing with Palestine during the eleventh century Crusades, whereas the second, “Late Love,” is a very contemporary autobiographical subject, recounted in the first person.

In My Michael (1968), the form of Oz’s presentation began to change somewhat. In this case the simple, direct style of the short story is retained in a longer novel that recounts the life of an Israeli couple, Hannah (the wife and narrator) and Michael. This first longer novel did not distract the author from developing his preferred form, the story. The Hill of Evil Counsel (1976) is an example of Oz’s expansion of the short story into a medium-length novella. This collection of three stories combines an account of middle-class Jews in their social relations with representatives of the British mandatory regime (1920–48) with much more impressionistic stories (one told through the eyes of a child) of personalities, families, and neighborhoods interacting (in this case in a setting of underground political resistance) with the same British “enemy.”

By the 1980s, Oz seemed ready to opt for the full-length novel but still did not abandon his preference for experimentation. Whereas A Perfect Peace (1982) was an extensive portrayal of a limited number of protagonists in a more or less continuous and standard story context, Black Box (1987) provided a new departure: Neither novel nor short story, Black Box is a set of stories-within-a-story about several characters in Israel and abroad whose lives are interconnected.

Standout Oz novels from the 1990s included Panther in the Basement (1998), about a boy growing up amid the Jewish insurgency against the British in the last years of Mandatory Palestine, and The Same Sea (1999), about the complex relationships among a widower, his expatriate son, and his son's girldfriend, written in an experimental style as a series of prose poems. He continued writing fiction well into the twenty-first century, publishing such novels as Between Friends (2012) and Judas (2014). Also, starting in the 1990s, Oz began publishing more nonfiction, including essay collections on topics such as politics (Israel, Palestine and Peace, 1995) and literature (The Story Begins: Essays on Literature, 1999), as well as his acclaimed autobiographical novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), which was adapted for the big screen in a 2015 film of the same name starring Natalie Portman. Along with How to Cure a Fanatic (2006), he also published the nonfiction works Jews and Words (2012), through which he explores the concept of language in the context of Jewish culture with his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land (2017), which is composed of three essays.

Oz’s most striking characteristic over five decades of prolific fiction writing was his ability to experiment, not so much with subject matter, as with the literary forms used to present his realistic and convincing protagonists.

Oz married Nily Oz-Zuckerman in 1960, and they had three children and a number of grandchildren. Following a battle with cancer, Oz died on December 28, 2018, at the age of seventy-nine.

Bibliography

Aschkenasy, Nehama. “On Jackals, Nomads, and the Human Condition.” Midstream, vol. 29, 1983, pp. 58–60.

Balaban, Avraham. Between Good and Beast: An Examination of Amos Oz’s Prose. Pennsylvania State UP, 1993.

Bargad, Warren. “Amos Oz and the Art of Fictional Response.” Midstream, 1976, pp. 61–64.

Bloom, Harold, editor. Amoz Oz. Chelsea House, 1992.

Dickstein, Morris. Review of The Hill of Evil Counsel, by Amos Oz. New York Times Book Review, 28 May 1978, p. 5.

Fuchs, Esther. Israeli Mythogynies: Women in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction. State U of New York P, 1987.

Jacobson, David. Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers. State U of New York P, 1987.

Kershner, Isabel. "Amos Oz, Israeli Author and Peace Advocate, Dies at 79." The New York Times, 28 Dec. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/obituaries/amos-oz-dead.html. Accessed 5 Feb. 2019.

Mazor, Yair. Somber Lust: The Art of Amos Oz. Translated by Margaret Weinberger-Rotman. State U of New York P, 2002.

McElroy, Joseph. Review of Unto Death, by Amos Oz. New York Times Book Review, 26 Oct. 1975, p. 4.

Mojtabai, A. G. Review of Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories, by Amos Oz. New York Times Book Review, 26 Apr. 1981, p. 3.

Peleg, Yaron. "Writing the Land: Language and Territory in Modern Hebrew Literature." Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 12, no.2, 2013, pp. 297–312.

Yudkin, Leon. 1948 and After: Aspects of Israeli Fiction. U of Manchester P, 1984.