A Tale of Love and Darkness (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Nicholas de Lange (Translator) "I WAS BORN and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment..." (more)
Key Phrases: newspaper department, Tel Aviv, Grandpa Alexander, Grandma Shlomit (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This memoir/family history brims over with riches: metaphors and poetry, drama and comedy, failure and success, unhappy marriages and a wealth of idiosyncratic characters. Some are lions of the Zionist movement—David Ben-Gurion (before whom a young Oz made a terrifying command appearance), novelist S.Y. Agnon, poet Saul Tchernikhovsky—others just neighbors and family friends, all painted lovingly and with humor. Though set mostly during the author's childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940s and '50s, the tale is epic in scope, following his ancestors back to Odessa and to Rovno in 19th-century Ukraine, and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove them with their families to Palestine in the early 1930s. In a rough, dusty, lower-middle-class suburb of Jerusalem, both of Oz's parents found mainly disappointment: his father, a scholar, failed to attain the academic distinction of his uncle, the noted historian Joseph Klausner. Oz's beautiful, tender mother, after a long depresson, committed suicide when Oz (born in 1939) was 12. By the age of 14, Oz was ready to flee his book-crammed, dreary, claustrophobic flat for the freedom and outdoor life of Kibbutz Hulda. Oz's personal trajectory is set against the background of an embattled Palestine during WWII, the jubilation after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the violence and deprivations of Israel's war of independence and the months-long Arab siege of Jerusalem. This is a powerful, nimbly constructed saga of a man, a family and a nation forged in the crucible of a difficult, painful history.
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From The Washington Post

Of all the terrible questions that Alice is asked in Wonderland, the most terrible is puffed out by the hookah-smoking Caterpillar: "Who Are You?" As Alice knows, the question has no answer. The only speck of the world that must remain invisible to us is our self. In our own eyes, we can be nothing but looking-glass images, always plural, the reflections that others send back to us and that we incessantly make ours or reject. An autobiography is therefore at best a kaleidoscopic pattern of imagined memories and intuitive leaps that portrays not one author but several, or at least a protean author moving endlessly between past and present, ignorance and experience, reflection and surprise. As such, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz's autobiography is utterly successful.

Both in his fiction and his essays, Oz has proven himself one of our essential writers, laying out for our observation, in ever-increasing breadth and profundity, the mad landscape of our time and his place -- always enlarging the scope of his questions while avoiding the temptation of dogmatic answers. His latest exploration, A Tale of Love and Darkness (beautifully translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange) appears to merely chronicle Oz's life from childhood in British-ruled Jerusalem to literary fame in Kibbutz Hulda, where Oz (born Amos Braz) still lives and where he adopted his nom de plume. But there are no single straight lines in Oz's narratives; for him, all things are plural. The family house where he grew up; the languages spoken by his family; the complex personalities of its members; the books that crowded the shelves of his widely read parents and turned the boy into "a word child"; the recurrent references to his mother and her death when the boy was just 12 (a death that, we learn halfway through the book, was a suicide); the state about to be born in a world still bloody from the war; the crowds of refugees and pioneers and survivors that peopled it; Oz's literary masters, ranging from Chekhov (in Hebrew) to Sherwood Anderson (in English): Every event, every factual detail, every discovery opens myriad doors to other events, facts and unexpected revelations. The writer who attempts his autobiography is, Oz suggests, like a man who "knocks on the door of a house where he is a regular visitor and where he is used to being very warmly received, but when the door opens, a stranger suddenly looks out at him and recoils in surprise, as though asking, Who are you, sir, and why exactly are you here?"

I felt an eerie sense of deja vu reading Oz's description of the daily goings-on during the early years of the state of Israel. My father was named Argentina's ambassador to Israel when I was only a few months old, and the first seven years of my life were spent in the same Babel as Oz's, where adults switched to other languages to avoid being understood by the children and where conversation drifted from German to Russian, from Spanish (in my case) or Polish (in Oz's) to French and English and Yiddish, when not to the rigors of Hebrew. The same "scholars, musicians and writers" described by Oz, the same "Tolstoyans" (whom Oz's parents referred to as "Tolstoyshchiks"), the same "cultivated Englishmen with perfect manners," the same "cultured Jews or educated Arabs" glided in and out of my childhood world as they did in Oz's. And of course the same Holocaust survivors, of whom my governess had told me I must never ask anything, especially not the meaning of the black numbers tattooed on their arms, and whose rage was solid, palpable, like that of the old man whom Oz describes hissing words full of hatred at him and his playmates: "A million Kinder they killed! Kiddies like you! Slaughtered them!" -- as though, Oz adds, "he were cursing us."

Oz describes what it was (and is) like to live in a country that, since its inception, has been constantly under threat; and he tells of the painful relationship between Arab and Jew. "In the lives of individuals and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted," he writes. "It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will unite out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor. . . . Often each sees in the other not a partner in misfortune but in fact the image of their own common oppressor." Arabs, says Oz, see Israeli Jews not as "a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East," while Israelis see Arabs not as "fellow victims" but as "pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as if our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads and grown moustaches, but they are still our old murderers interested only in slitting Jews' throats for fun."

It is impossible to give a full account of this book's riches. Oz has allowed his autobiography to flow along a rocky course, with numerous starts and various endings. Wisely, he does not impose the restrictive method ordered by another of Wonderland's creatures: "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end, then stop." Oz knows that every autobiography is circular and that, even though the writer begins telling his story at the moment when the book must end, the points of entry are legion. The first words of A Tale of Love and Darkness are the conventional ones -- "I was born" -- but many times throughout the book Oz offers the reader other possible starting places: "I was an only child," or "Almost sixty years have gone by, yet I can still remember his smell," or "Every morning, a little before or a little after sunrise, I am in the habit of going out to discover what is new in the desert," or "I was actually a very easy child. . . . " To the impossible question of the Caterpillar, Oz answers with a multitude of reflections, each one essential and each one necessarily incomplete.

Halfway through A Tale of Love and Darkness, in what could be yet another beginning scene, Oz hears the first chords of Beethoven's "Für Elise" played by a girl he calls Nemucheleh, "stumbling over and over again, always in the same place, and each time trying again," while a bird he calls Elise replies to her "over and over again" with the famous five first notes. The repeated, ever-beginning tune may serve as a model for reading this extraordinary, luminous, wise and important book -- each new attempt at commencement strengthened by preceding ones, and by the ones to come. Oz's last words, describing the tragedy of his mother's death, support this suggestion. After taking a handful of sleeping pills and falling into a sleep free at last from nightmares, she is rushed to the hospital, where doctors try to wake her. But, Oz tells us, "she did not wake up in the morning either, or even when the day grew brighter, and from the branches of the ficus tree in the garden of the hospital the bird Elise called to her in wonderment and called to her again and again in vain, and yet it went on trying over and over again, and it still tries sometimes."

Reviewed by Alberto Manguel
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; 1 edition (November 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151008787
• ISBN-13: 978-0151008780
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #110,873 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I was a word-child...but I had no one to listen to me.", October 26, 2004

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

The child of Ashkenazi Jews who escaped to Jerusalem just before the outbreak of World War II, Amos Klausner (the author's original name) grew up in a scholarly family which encouraged his precocity. His great uncle Joseph was Chair of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and wrote his magnum opus about Jesus of Nazareth. His father read sixteen or seventeen languages, wrote poetry, and had an enormous library, while his mother spoke four or five languages, could read seven or eight, and told elaborate stories.

Amos grew up a solitary child, encouraged to entertain himself while his parents worked. Always a writer at heart, he believed that "it was not enough for me to be intelligent, rational, good, sensitive, creative." He often felt he was a "one-child show...a non-stop performance," always on display to the relatives, his accomplishments never seeming to be enough.

In this elaborate, non-linear autobiography, Oz and his family are seen as archetypal immigrants to Jerusalem, people who arrived when the land was still under British rule and who helped create a new homeland, arguing ferociously about the direction the country should take and the leaders who should lead it. The history of Jerusalem combines with the author's own genealogical records and his memories about his early family life to create a broad picture of the society in which he grew up and in which his writing talent took root.

Detailed, highly descriptive, and filled with introspection about his unusual life, the book shows the tensions within the society and within his family. After his mother's suicide when he was twelve, he broke with his father, joined a kibbutz, and, at fifteen changed his name. His observations about himself in relation to his peers and in relation to the outside world, even at that young age, show his inner turmoil and determination to discover a personal identity.

As the book moves back and forth in time, the author comments about his writing, the people who influenced him, and his "pickpocketing," his "stealing" of the lives of real people in order to invent stories about them. His observations about Israel, its leaders, its never-ending wars with the Arabs, and his experience as a resident of a kibbutz for more than thirty years broaden the scope and provide insight into one man's life in this developing country. Obviously a huge achievement for Oz personally, this is also a huge contribution to the understanding of the growth of a Jewish homeland and to an understanding of how Oz became the writer he is. Much more detailed and leisurely than Oz's novels, this is slow but satisfying reading for those who admire his novels. Mary Whipple

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sorry if I posted twice A Warning:, May 26, 2005

By	readernyc "readernyc" (New York City, NY USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

As I wrote yesterday, but deleted because I don't use my real name, this book is everything the news and customers have posted. I will only add this WARNING. Those of you, who, like myself, read about this book as the story of his mother's suicide, have been given a slanted idea about " A Tale of Love and Darkness." Yes, his mother's suicide is here, but far more than that.

As others have said better than I: It's a history of Palestine (pre-Israel), the autobiography of a writer, the way that European Jews experienced lower class/lower middle class life Palestine in the late 30's, early 40's, and all the myriad influences and people that created the great Amos Oz, who is surprisingly modest throughout. REALLY modest.

Yes, as others have said, Oz is my favorite author. BUT, no one should imagine that this will be an easy read, because it is not. It isn't written to excite;is not plot-driven but meditative and far-ranging, as well as non-linear. It differs from Oz' other work, both novels and non-fiction, in that way. It is a long march and the reader must do some hard work to keep up with chronology and mostly to keep one's interest going.

Do not buy this because of a few sensationalist views. Buy this, and yes, I too believe it is a MASTERPIECE, truly AMAZING-- if you are interested in: writing, Israel, Kibbutz life, in exile and hope, in situational despair, in character portraits, and in Oz himself.

His mother's death IS utterly wrenching but hardly the main story and his father comes to life through Oz' genius, as well as his unhappy O how unhappy mom. Also, beware that because he meanders hither and yon, when her death happens it hurts, man o does it! During the second section and esp on the last pages I was sobbing, as her life's end is overwhelmingly sad. But whoever I first read claiming this is the story of his mother, I believe was wrong. It is a HUGE travel and the reader needs energy to keep going, to keep interested until at some point, one is simply hooked.

I recommend this book highly but for experienced readers only, not looking for a quick fix, nor a page turner. For those who want a panoramtic and highly detailed tale, yes buy this and work it. I'm so glad Amos Oz dared to write a book so different from his other ones as he is a private man, a great one, and he got so much right here. Dig in and don't expect to love it all, not at the beginning. I remember almost every vignette now but it took three tries to get 'in'.

39 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Longtime readers of Oz say "This is his masterwork", October 26, 2004

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

A number of long- time readers of Amos Oz have said that this is by far his greatest work and a true masterpiece.
They say his evocation of the Jerusalem world of the thirties and forties is unmatched. That his description of his problematic and tremendously interesting intellectually overcharged family is done with dignity and distance which is nonetheless heartwarming.
They say that Oz born to the right and having lived his political life largely as champion of the left provides a balanced picture of the fundamental political argument which has divided the Israeli public for years.
They say that this story of a family is also one of the most convincing evocations of the early years of Israel .
They speak of it as a gripping, moving read from start to finish.





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