A Tale of Love and Darkness

I've had this book since soon after it was published, but I avoided reading it. My uncle gave me the book, having read half of it already, and told me it was "wonderful." This is the same uncle who once thought that a pumpkin pie was "wonderful," even though my grandmother had omitted all sweetener from the filling and the rest of us thought it tasted pretty horrible. This is all to say, the book was recommended to me by someone with highly suspect taste.

In any event, the book is wonderful. It's beautifully written. It's interesting. It's the kind of book that you can't wait to finish but don't want to end.

I don't read much non-fiction. I also don't gravitate toward books on "stressful" topics, like the Arab-Israeli conflict. This book show more is, as much as any memoir can be, non-fiction. Oz does write factually about Israeli independence, European antisemitism, and his family's history. But, it's ultimately a very personal and intimate book, and that's what made it a pleasure to read.

I thought the book seemed like a very honest account. He shows us what an annoying little child he sometimes was. You see his regrets. You cringe at his misplaced confidence, which seems to have derived from a very active fantasy life. show less

Oz writes about his parents, their background in Russia and how they came to Palestine in the thirties; about his childhood in a suburb of Jerusalem, the creation of the state of Israel and the war of 1948; about his mother's illness and death, and his decision to leave home in his early teens and move to a kibbutz, and - indirectly - about how all that shaped the kind of writer he became.

This is already a fascinating story from the purely historical point of view - I knew very little about Israel, and most of what I've read about the Jewish experience in the 20th century has been by people who either experienced the Nazi terror at first hand or who emigrated to Britain or the US. So it was very interesting to read about the Zionist show more movement in the early 20th century, Tarbut schools, the politics surrounding the creation of the new state, and all the rest. And particularly about the role played by the reinvention of Hebrew as a modern language. It's not many writers who get to work in a language on which the ink is still wet - Oz records that his father's uncle, Joseph Klausner, was responsible for devising the Hebrew words for such basic concepts as "shirt", "pencil" and "rhinoceros". Oz himself was brought up speaking only Hebrew, but his parents and most of their neighbours still used Russian, Yiddish, and various other European languages between themselves, especially when something had to be said that wasn't for the boy's ears.

The way emigration to Palestine worked also meant that Oz grew up in a very odd social environment in which almost every adult in the very poor neighbourhood where they lived seemed to be a poet, scholar, physician or politician of some kind. His father was a literary scholar, working as an academic librarian since there weren't enough students to provide employment for more than a small fraction of the teachers. One of young Amos's early memories is of being told off very firmly for arranging his little collection of picture books on the shelf by size. We don't do that sort of thing in this house!

Then there's the whole theme of the cultures that are competing to define the new nation - all the different permutations of secular humanism versus orthodox Judaism, suits and ties vs. suntans and shorts, Tel Aviv vs. Jerusalem, shtetl vs. kibbutz, left vs. right, peaceful coexistence vs. permanent war, one state vs. two, and so on - none of them a straightforward choice.

But even if you start reading this book for its subject-matter, you will probably go on because of Oz's extraordinary skill as a storyteller. Every little anecdote is a joy in itself, but it also draws you in further along the carefully constructed path of the story, bringing you towards the narrative crux, the key event in his childhood, his mother's death. But not actually reaching it until the very end of the book - each time the story approaches this key moment, it swerves off in a different direction, and these moments of not telling turn out to be some of the most expressive in the book. Very moving.

I was also struck by the ease with which Oz switches between the narrative voice of the observant child and that of the analytical adult, which is often something that gives memoirs an awkwardly disjointed feel - most writers are much better at one than the other. Here we hardly notice the joins, as he tells us about what he remembers seeing and hearing, then moves on seamlessly to reflect with hindsight on the wider context. He even manages to do this convincingly in the secondhand account of his mother's childhood in Rovno, as told him many years afterwards by her sister. show less

If you can call your autobiography "A Tale of Love and Darkness" and make it seem halfway appropriate, you've probably done something right. Despite its dramatic -- if well-earned -- title, Amos Oz's memoir moves along at a leisurely pace over over five-hundred plain-spoken yet wonderfully precise pages. For what's purported to be an autobiography, its narrative isn't particularly linear, is hardly tightly plotted, and, at times, it seems pretty uninterested in its own subject. One gets to know the author, but often get the feeling that he doesn't consider himself the most important element in it. It's a refreshing and unexpectedly effective way to relate a life story.

Instead, we get a fond recollection of pre-partition Jerusalem, show more which comes off, as sleepy, crumbling town whose myriad ethnicities looked anxiously toward an uncertain future. We hear about some of his famous relatives, which include noted historian Joseph Klausner and various other luminaries on the Israeli right wing. We hear about the author's neighbors who shared space with him in a crowded, slightly shoddy lower-middle class neighborhood. And, perhaps most importantly, we hear about the author's parents. Indeed, "A Tale of Love and Darkness" sometimes seems as much about the author's life and successes and about their difficult and often frustrated lives -- the author's father was an emotionally awkward, rather pedantic academic, while his mother seemed his opposite in every way, a beautiful, charismatic, intellectually sharp and melancholic beauty. What's most remarkable about all this is how faithfully Oz seems to have recreated all of this: he takes his readers on walks around old Jerusalem and reconstructs the social, intellectual, and political circles that his parents ran in with a surprising degree of accuracy. It's not surprising, then, that there's a lot here about the formative years of the Israeli state, and about the conflicting intellectual and religious currents that drove it. For the record, the author's parents and grandparents seemed to favor a conservative model that had a lot in common with nineteenth-century European nationalism, while the author himself ended up in the Kibbutz movement. While his family emigrated before the Second World War, one also gets a real sense of what a touch-and-go, improvised affair state-building could be: Oz describes both an agrarian industry and a stat bureaucracy being built, more or less, from the ground up.

When it comes to the author himself, he seems most enthusiastic when talking about his literary and sexual development, and his passion for both books and women fairly blasts through the pages. His description of life at Kibbutz Hulda is also interesting, as it follows his transformation from a shy, pale, and nervous city boy to a much stronger and more confident farmer. While he mentions that he left the Kibbutz in 1985, the author seems to avoid expressing opinions about contemporary Israeli politics, though he takes care to emphasize that some of the most important moments of his lives were those when he realized -- or was taught -- that the Arab residents of the Levant on the other side of the fence were, in fact, human. To sum up, "A Tale of Love and Darkness" is well worth reading. I'm planning to read Anthony Shadid's "House of Stone" to see if it might contain a similar story from a very different perspective. show less

This is a slow, rich read. A meandering of vignettes that explore a life within a family within a community within the birth of Israel and the loss of Europe. It explores universal truths manifested in ordinary lives. Oz’s life was one of an insatiable reader and lover of words. He grew up in a community of readers, writers, thinkers, debaters, scholars, and immigrants in Jerusalem. Yet, the book is about what was never spoken inside all the speaking. It’s about how he turned his back on all this and chose to the live the life of a farmer on a kibbutz, yet finds himself still to be a writer. He writes of the immense struggle to bring the seeds of life to fruition, whether in the concrete-hard dirt of his tiny backyard or in his show more heart. He writes of family scattered, of homes lost, of rebuilding, of dreams and deep disappointments, of love and darkness.

There is an excellent BookTV author event available on YouTube, where Oz talks about his book. He talks of dreams, saying that the surest way of losing the beauty of a dream is to fulfill it. http://www.c-span.org/video/?178612...

In our fast-paced, scrambling, packed-to-the-rafters, always-engaging lives,
I wonder…if we have any chance of laying for hours on a concrete slab as a child
and feeling so deeply as Amos did in his childhood,
or to dredge up such memories in adulthood,
much less to endure the hunt of that which bites into our flesh. show less

This book is intelligent, witty, heartfelt, appealing, and troubling. The author touches on many simple things of everyday life that make his life story unique and have affected his writing. With his superb prose, he puts readers in his own situation thereby giving a sense of what it must have felt like to live the life of Amos Oz. There are precious reminiscences, my favorite being his parents and himself on the one phone line from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv simply giving a weekly hello to relatives. He relates what it was like to celebrate the night of Israel’s Independence, what it was like to be ushered out of an auditorium after he had laughed at Menachem Begin’s use of the word “to arm”, how in awe he felt to be in the presence show more of David Ben Gurion, his deep shame at having caused harm to a young Arab boy, and how he became aware of his own political leanings. He also opened his soul in revealing the pain of his mother’s illness and then his loss of her.

I love Oz’s writing. It’s very passionate, but often in a very understated way. This is a truly special book. Enjoy it. show less

Until now, I have never read anything by Amos Oz. After reading his memoir, I intend to read whatever I can find. This book is complex and works on many levels: as family history, as a history of the foundation of the state of Israel through a child's eyes, and as an exploration of that family history and especially his parents' marriage and his mother's suicide when Oz was 12 years old. I could not put this book down, no matter how dark the events he relates. At times comic, at times analytic, at times poetic and at times tragic, this is a book for everyone.

Bits of this book have made me think about how tough a translator's job is. At one point, Oz says he remembers what a teacher had said "about poems and sounds . . . about the different sounds that various words make: 'rustling,' for example, is a whispering word, 'strident' is a screeching word, 'growl' has a deep, thick sound, while 'tone' has a delicate sound and the word 'noise' is itself noisy."

But, of course, Oz wrote in Hebrew. So the non-Hebrew reader does not know exactly what words the teacher spoke of, and the translator has to find words in English that will convey the essence of her meaning.