From his earliest novels, Amos Oz has been telling the stories of people’s lives along with the accompanying conflicts, political travails and sacrifices that have marked the development of the state of Israel. He engages his readers through his use of language and shared stories of love, loss and life lived in this complicated but always fascinating country.
Born in Jerusalem in 1939, the son of Eastern European Zionists – Yehuda Arieh Klausner and Fania Mussman – Oz was raised in a tight-knit community and large extended family. Life was not easy, given the close quarters and austere existence that marked those days of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Oz’s parents were Revisionist Zionists, subscribing to the beliefs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the right to establish a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. The Partition Agreement of 1948 was anathema to them – they opposed David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weitzman’s political platforms – and Oz’s great uncle, Joseph Klausner, ran as an opposition candidate for president against Weitzman.
As Oz describes in painful, beautifully wrought prose in his 2003 book, A Tale of Love and Darkness -- a memoir cum novel that has been described as one of the most important books written about life in Israel since the state was founded -- his mother committed suicide when he was just 12 years old. The effect on the family was traumatic. Oz left home at fifteen and became a Labor Zionist – taking on the socialist views of state creation and the new, progressive Jewish society -- and moved to Kibbutz Hulda not far from the center of the country.
He wasn’t much of a farmer according to all accounts, but for thirty years, Oz lived, wrote and raised a family on the kibbutz before moving in 1986 to the southern desert town of Arad. He has churned out a remarkable number of books – story collections, novels, non-fiction – publishing on an almost yearly basis from 1965, when his first book, Where the Jackals Howl, a collection of stories, was first published.
Oz is a realist whose early life taught him that reality, while often painful, is the prism through which life is seen and understood. From the anguished lines in My Michael, a tale of a marriage gone awry, to The Black Box, a disturbing narrative of divorce, abuse and family dysfunction, Oz has continually told the story of the human condition, with all its aches and pains. His works of non-fiction – newspaper articles as well as essay collections – are meant to engage his fellow Israelis in a dialogue about their country, politics, religious views and hopes for the future.
To read Amos Oz is to gain access to a man with a long view on the past as well as a vision of the future. From his Eastern European antecedents to a life lived in Jerusalem, the kibbutz and now the desert, Oz has traveled the land, and continues to examine its inhabitants and their lives.
Go to Israel with Daat to Learn, Explore and Specialized Israel Tours.
