Where The Jackals Howl and Other Stories

I've been a fan of Amos Oz for a few years now, ever since I took a Hebrew Literature class in college. With each of the stories of his I've read there's always been a different set of similar but distinct sensations and images evoked. He conjures up an Israel at times real and imagined, fantastic and horrible, dream realized and waking disappointment incarnate.

This, his earliest work and a collection of short stories, is a decent book with a few moments of shimmering incandescence. The stories show the promise of the writer to come but, unfortunately, too many of them fall prey to amateur writer syndrome in that Oz tends to OVERwrite with too many overly flowered and almost Steinbeck-like descriptions of naturalistic imagery...save for show more an emphasis on the growing sinister and the recurring purity as opposed to Steinbeck's biblical grandeur.

Oz, like he said wonderfully in an interview, that (paraphrase) the thing about fighting for and achieving a dream is that it forces you to wake up. That to me is the essence of not only Where the Jackals Howl but much of Oz's oeuvre as a whole. The characters in these stories run the gamut of idealistic to the point of being monuments to denial all the way to the cynical to the point of disappearing whose lack of roots or belief in anything almost makes it seem as though they're soon to be drifting off from the world.

Therein lies one of the central contradictions inherent in Oz's work...he de-romanticizes the tropes of early Zionism (the New Hebrew and his heroic working of the Land of Israel on the kibbutz, in the field of battle, never stopping for the eyes of the enemy never close, all the while building a 'new' image of the tough Israeli superior in all ways to the Exile Jew) while attempting to make Romantic the actual world around him, the one of the day to day, essentially the real world that the Zionist dreamers had to wake up to as soon as statehood was declared. Oz sees the flaws inherent in the old banners and slogans, and is attempting to reap from the land itself a new semblance of meaning. But what he finds isn't always good, sometimes it's even horrifying.

These stories are torn between dreams and reality, and the interplay of the former and latter bleeding into one another while the old posture and peacock as best they can for the young to maintain their glory and legacy, is a sight to behold. Though, again, Oz tries too hard and buries the good of his story beneath a stripling writer's need to scream out everything on his mind and heart and soul on every other damn page.

However, the final story in the collection Upon This Evil Earth, a retelling of the story of the biblical figure Jephthah, is not only the best piece in the collection (it's haunting, horrifying, and even mystifying in its describing of a place and a time not only otherworldly but all too human in its savagery and pitch perfect description of rage and loneliness in a world where god infinitely loves the some and not the all) but may also be one of the best short stories I've read up until this writing. If only for that piece I recommend reading Where the Jackals Howl.

All in all, through every story, I see a writer struggling to dream and have passion for the sweetness of life in a land and among a people that see the only fruitful endeavors as being either work or war, art being frivolous unless approved by majority vote. It's a sad but beautiful struggle, all things considered. show less

26. Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories by Amos Oz
published: 1965 in Hebrew
translation: 1973, 1976 & 1981 By [[Nicholas De Lange]] & [[Philip Simpson]]
format: 230-page Mariner Books paperback published 2012
acquired: May 2020 read: May 26-29 time reading: 8:15, 2.2 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Israeli short stories theme: TBR
locations: mostly a Kibbutz in Israel, ~1960. Also Jerusalem and a Biblical-era desert.
about the author: 1939-2018, Israeli author born in Jerusalem

This is Amos Oz‘s first book, a strong but mildly difficult collection of short stories mostly on Israeli Kibbutz life. Oz left his home to live permanently on Kibbutz at age 15 (~1954). So he writes from an experienced perspective on years where the Kibbutz was made show more up of European refugees, the founding philosophers, and their non-refugee children. The stories are a bit brutal, exploring these stoic idealist leader-philosophers working against the raw elements on these new farms; and exploring what this hard life does to people.

This is my fourth book by Oz, and I purchased this one because I wanted to read his first book. The other three, [My Michael], [Black Box], and his memoir, [A Tale of Love and Darkness], were terrific. This was good writing, interesting, but not really fun reading. So only recommended to the really curious.

2022
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