Amos Oz’s latest novel reaches us. Reading the excellent translation1 by Sylvie Cohen, one understands why it remained the No. 1 bestseller in Israel for several months and why the critics hailed it as one of the year’s finest texts.
It is an autobiographical narrative and, as the genre requires, the narrator recounts his childhood in Jerusalem and the striking figures of his family; but it is also a text studded with the reflections of a left-wing Israeli, committed to the Peace Now movement, who bears witness less to the old world—that Europe from which his whole family comes—than to the new world2, that Israel in the process of being built: thus chapter 48 corresponds to the winter of ’48–’49.
Throughout the novel the gaze of the child and that of the adult intersect, the same intelligence and the same sensibility, the same ineffable love of Israel, in that pairing of remarks—grave or tinged with humor—that both the militant and the adult make, the one about the childhood of his country and the other about his own, all their respective myths intermingled, in a smile and in urgency.
Here and There: A Geography of History
From the very first pages, and this is the great interest of the work, for its voice rings true, Amos Oz testifies in his own way to the place granted to Israel among the nations, to others’ gaze upon the Jews and upon Israel:
“People do not like the Jews because they are remarkably gifted and intelligent, but also because they are loud and pushy. They do not like what we have undertaken here in Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel], and they even envy us this marshy, rocky, desert plot of land. Over there in the world, the walls were covered with hateful graffiti: ‘Dirty Yid, go to Palestine’; so we went to Palestine, and today the whole world cries out to us: ‘Dirty Yid, get out of Palestine’” (p. 12).
Along with the history of Israel, where he is born in 1939, it is the whole emergence of Zionist patriotism that Amos Oz recalls, situating it historically:
“No one really suspected what awaited us, but in the 1920s, almost everyone knew deep down that the Jews had no future, either under Stalin, or in Poland, or anywhere in Eastern Europe, and that is how the idea of Palestine grew stronger… At the time, the Poles were fanatical patriots, like the Ukrainians, the Germans, and the Czechs—everyone, even the Slovaks, the Lithuanians, and the Latvians, except us, who had no place in this carnival; we belonged to nothing and nobody wanted us. There was therefore nothing extraordinary in our wishing to become a people like everyone else. We had no choice” (The story of my aunt Sonia, p. 212).
The interest of Amos Oz’s perspective—for example when he recounts the war of independence—is that he analyzes it as an Israeli and as a man of the left. Thus, with UNSCOP’s proposal at the end of August ’47 to partition the country into two independent States (p. 355), he recalls that at the roots of the conflict lie, on the one hand, the acceptance of Israel:
“The Jews approved, gritting their teeth: the State allotted to them did not include Jewish Jerusalem, the Upper Galilee, or its western part. 75% of the territory assigned to the Jews was a sterile desert” (p. 355).
And, on the other hand, the Arab refusal and its logic:
“They considered that Palestine had been Arab for centuries, until the arrival of the English, who had encouraged crowds of foreigners to pour into the whole country, to level hills, uproot century-old olive trees, buy by trickery every plot of land from corrupt owners, and drive off the peasants who had cultivated it for generations. If they were not stopped, these ingenious and crafty Jewish colonialists would make short work of this country; they would erase from it every trace of Arabness, flood it with their red-roofed European colonies, cover it with their arrogant and licentious customs, and would not be long in taking control of the holy places of Islam before spreading into the neighboring Arab countries. Very quickly, thanks to their cunning minds, their technical superiority, and the help of British imperialism, they would accomplish here exactly what the Whites had done to the natives of America, Australia, and elsewhere” (p. 355).
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is thus at the heart of the novel, and Amos Oz gives voice to characters of widely diverging opinions, such as this kibbutz comrade in 1954:
“In ’48, they tried to kill us all. In ’48, there was a terrible war, and they arranged it so that it would be them or us. We won and we took it from them. There is nothing to be proud of! But if they had won in ’48, there would be even less to be proud of: they would not have left a single Jew alive. And besides, there is not a single Jew living in their territory today. That is the question: it is because we took from them what we took in ’48 that we have what we have today. And it is because we have something now that we must take nothing more from them. There you have the difference between your Mr. Begin and me: if we take more from them one day, now that we have something, we will commit a very grave sin” (p. 451).
The richness of the novel lies in this diversity of the voices it summons and of the periods it retraces, but not only that: the changes of tone are delicious, from the grave to the tragic, from the funny to the ironic, with in particular that humor full of tenderness when Amos Oz recalls how the child he was in the 1940s had made the founding myths of Israel his own, among them the myth of the pioneers “from beyond the dark mountains”—that is to say, far from Jerusalem:
“We venerated their solid, dreamy image, with tractors and encampments in the background, on the posters of the Jewish National Fund (…) over there, in their home, truly great things were happening. Over there, they were building the country and remaking the world, they were erecting a new society, they were marking the landscape and history with their imprint, they were plowing the fields and planting the vine, they were composing a new poetry, riding on horseback, armed to the teeth, and answering with fire the gunfire of the Arab rioters; over there, miserable human dust was being transformed into a fighting nation” (p. 13).
Hinc et nunc: Histories of Beings and a Geography of the Intimate
A narrative of the genesis of Israel and of the narrator’s childhood, this “tale of love and darkness” associates and traverses several places: Jerusalem is at the center, where the narrator is born and spends his childhood, which he evokes in its daily life—that of Israel in its beginnings and of poverty, the apartments being tiny and piled on top of one another “like cages”; Jerusalem is also the family microcosm where people discuss “national problems while sipping tea around the samovar,” in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish, with the intellectuals, writers, and professors of the young University of Jerusalem, founded in 1925; it is the streets where he plays and strolls, the houses of friends; there is also the “unreal, inaccessible” Jerusalem, “which is only aspiration, desire for something not of this world.” In Israel there is also the kibbutz where the narrator goes to live at fifteen, two years after his mother’s death—his new life as a scrawny poet amid the “tanned ones” (“I hoped to become a sunburnt, robust tractor driver, a pioneer-socialist with no qualms, free at last of libraries, erudition, and the critical apparatus”)—and then Arad, where he settles and lives, happily far from his adolescent project: he writes down his states of mind, surrounded by books, far from the tractors and the robust, sunburnt pioneers (but always fairly close to the critical apparatus).
Far and not far from Israel, there is of course the Europe from which the narrator’s whole family comes, the Europe present in the novel, but always as a watermark, as a hollow, notably through its languages and those he does not understand:
“Papa read sixteen or seventeen languages and spoke eleven. Mama spoke four or five and read seven or eight. They conversed in Russian and Polish when they did not want me to understand. For culture, they read mostly in German and English, and probably dreamed in Yiddish.”
This Europe is in the novel as at the origin, a “before-Israel” from which not everyone will return, as becomes obvious as early as 1945: “Those who did not see their relatives arrive in Israel understood that they had been massacred by the Germans. Anguish reigned in Jerusalem, an anguish that people did their best to push back to the bottom of themselves” (page 317).
Finally, the geography of the intimate is organized around the figure of the mother, the happy life “before”—before illness built its borders and placed the protagonists “a thousand years of darkness apart from one another”: “I write in order to give a second chance to what had none and could have none” (page 33).
Writing of the past, of family rites and happy moments, writing of pain, of revolt, this novel is also, like all writing of trauma, a constant quest for the before-the-drama, for what announced it, what gives it, if not meaning, at least a meaning. It is therefore the whole childhood of the mother that is evoked, with the history of the family, its figures and tales, the education of girls in the secular Jewish schools of Ukraine and in particular at the Tarbut secondary school in Rovno, the dead ends of this progressive education of girls in a society where they cannot yet manage to make a place for themselves.
“A kind of romantic lichen had impregnated the heart of my mother and her friends in their youth, an affective haze, dense, Russo-Polish, midway between Chopin and Mickiewicz… deluded my mother and seduced her until she committed suicide in 1952” (p. 230).
But what ends does not efface what is born: the autobiographical narrative, when it recounts “memories of childhood and youth,”3 is almost always the narrative of a “crossing of appearances,” the end of the world of childhood, its myths and illusions, in order to find access to one’s own history, to one’s own self-realization. Which for Oz passes through writing, through his own books.
For books and myths, all narratives, are the matter of the novel, a matter as living as the beings of flesh and speech who fill the pages of this story: those of the father’s library, the Holy of Holies or, more simply, the adult space to which the child dreams of gaining access; those his mother reads day and night during the sleepless nights of an endless depression; those he sets about devouring as soon as he can read; and finally those he will write, including this one.
As much as it is made of stories of books, this book is made of the entanglement of narratives, most of the characters finding in the novel a place for their speech as for their memory. And from this plurality of voices is born the tone of the novel, rich for being at the crossroads of all these tones and feelings, exile or kingdom according to the beings and the moments, a child’s battles on the living-room carpet or real combats, the voice of sorrows and of pleasures, of bodies and of souls, of fulfillments and of dead ends, of the living and the absent.
Between macrocosm and microcosm, love and darkness, a world that is barely foreign to us.