Product Description

Love and darkness are just two of the powerful forces that run through Amos Oz's extraordinary, moving story. He takes us on a bold, seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, a quixotic child's eye view along Jerusalem's wartorn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. And at the tragic heart of the tale is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half years old. Soon after, still a gawky adolescent, he left home, changed his name and became a tractor driver on a kibbutz. 'Jews go back to Palestine' urged the graffiti in 1930s Lithuania, so they went; then later the walls of Europe shouted 'Jews get out of Palestine'. Oz's story dives into 120 years of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Those who stayed in Europe were murdered; those who escaped took the past with them. In search of the roots of his family tragedy, he uncovers the secrets and skel

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #518340 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Review
Prize-winning author Amos Oz turns to the subject of his own history in this extensive and powerful memoir. Taking us back through generations Oz combines his own memories with colourful tales of his extensive family and the Jewish culture that surrounded them. Taking us from Jerusalem to Odessa, Poland and beyond Oz writes with meticulous all-consuming detail and thought, illustrating for us the struggles, adventures and relationships that shaped his life from his early exposure and fascination with literature and capacity to soak up every detail of the quirky characters and events that surrounded him, through his mother's tragic suicide and his decision to leave his past behind, change his name and move to a kibbutz. At the heart of Oz's tale run the two themes of his title, the love and darkness of life that surrounds us all and which follow Oz through his life's journey through the twentieth century, shaping his past, present and future. (Kirkus UK)

From the Publisher
Tragic, comic and incomparable: an autobiographical epic and a comedie humaine for our times, which is both the portrait of an artist and the story of the birth of a nation, spanning several generations and moving with them from Russia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, to Jerusalem.

About the Author
Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into 30 languages. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize and the Frankfurt Peace Prize. He lives in Arad, Israel.

Customer Reviews

Less a memoir, more a work of art.
This wide ranging book is describes as a memoir, but it is more a poetic elegy to the birth of Israel and one man's development into a writer. Amos Oz charts the forces of love and darkness that shape the land of Israel and his own character.

He delves deep back into his family ancestry, back to his grandfathers and grandmothers and back to the old folklore and Jewish customs of prewar Eastern Europe. He describes the ambivalent nature of Jewish relations with the Slavic people in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia and the growth of the Zionist ideal among the Ashkenazi Jews. Oz relates the story of the escape of both sets of grandparents to Palestine, so avoiding the fate of his other relatives such as his cousin Daniel, the same age as the writer. The dark forests of Russian folklore were the scene of many Nazi atrocities particularly in the Ukraine, from where his mother's family originated.

The central figures in the book are his parents and himself as a precocious child surrounded by intellectual academics such as Uncle Joseph and many other colourful friends and grandparents, as they build new lives in the Jewish homeland. The young Amos has many encounters in wartorn Jerusalem with other characters including Arab children and adults. The small boy fantasizes about playing wargames with the unpopular British, who in 1947 were controlling Palestine. When the war of Independence comes in 1948 and the British leave, the sense of danger and vulnerability are well documented.

And yet the central heart of the book is personal tragedy, as Oz heartrendingly describes the breakdown of his mother and his father's doomed efforts to save her. His parents come across as two well meaning, loving people interested passionately in words and literature. His father is however disappointed in his career and seeks to fill in long family silences with words. The dark forces of disappointment,nostalgia and other unresolved issues overwhelm his mother and lead to her tragic suicide.

The book is a triumphant testimony to the creation of a young nation born in blood and surviving against all expectations. Oz survives too the fragility of his own childhood and the weight of parental hopes borne down upon his young shoulders. He finally realises his dream of joining a kibbutz by escaping from the cramped and ghost-ridden flat in Jerusalem. On Kibbutz Hulda he lives the life of an agricultural worker, becoming part of the new generation of Jewish pioneers. He also changes his European name to a Hebrew name. The love of words which he inherits from his parents proves his salvation and he becomes a writer of everyday events on the kibbutz and elsewhere.

In this fascinating book Oz reveals the ideas and the writers that influenced his early life and those ideas that he reacted against. He also describes encounters with the architects of the new Israel, who were responsible for the modern Israeli mentality.This is different to the mentality of his parents and grandparents, who were scarred by the years of loss and exile. He writes all this in a clear and elegant prose. This book will engage anyone who is interested in Israel and the Middle East, but can be read equally as one man's own remarkable story.

A moving autobiography
The story works on many levels-political, historical and philosophical. However, the success of the book is in the way these themes are interwoven and translated through Oz's experiences and their effects on him and his family. Producing an intensely moving and sad autobiography which starts as far back as his grandparents can recall.

The vivid storytelling and attention to detail transports the reader in to the book and invites you to smell, taste, see and feel the people and places described. The emotions Oz feels, (and allows the reader to experience) are set against a varied backdrop from Eastern Europe to Jerusalem. This fascinating ride is punctuated with increasingly frequent references to his mother's death which arrives with soul destroying inevitability.

In some ways the whole story is about Oz searching to understand why she killed herself and how it affected his life.

If you want to read about the Holocaust, Palestine or the birth of Israel there are many books which would provide more detail. However the loss, emptiness and ecstacy of these events are shown in sharp relief against this incredibly personal story. A story about a boy, his family and life.

A masterpiece
Although a very different work, in stature this book ranks with Nabokov's Speak Memory as one of the greatest of autobiographies. Of course it is the autobiography of a master novelist and so it is much more than the story of a life. Through the medium of a rich population of characters it explores the history of central and eastern European Jewry, the founding of the State of Israel, but also, and centrally, the coming of age of a young boy and the slide into depression and suicide of a beautiful and gifted woman (his mother). In all it is a complete and painfully moving work of art.