A Tale of Love and Darkness [Paperback]

Amos Oz (Author), Nicholas de Lange (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2005

Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.

It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide, a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen and joins a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel.

A story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

An international novelist of stature, Oz makes an assured leap to autobiography and is greeted with reverence and awe. Aware of the universality of his story, he enlists excerpts from the diaries of friends and relatives to provide a broader context. He also forgoes tying his narrative to a strict timeline, opting instead for a circular approach. Settings and characters bear the vibrant imprint of his descriptive skills. For all the praise, a few devil’s advocates lurk out there—David Cesarini of The Independent calls the prose "dense … almost liturgical"—but even he concedes that it’s an impressive piece of work. It is rare for a fiction writer’s life to be more dramatic than his novels, but such is the case with Oz.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reprint edition (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015603252X
• ISBN-13: 978-0156032520
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #49,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #50 in Books > History > Middle East > Israel

More About the Author

AMOS OZ is a world-renowned novelist and essayist whose books include My Michael, To Know a Woman, Don't Call It Night, and The Same Sea. Most recently, his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, received the Koret Jewish Book Award.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

150 of 156 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 HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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

82 of 84 people found the following review helpful

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

By readernyc VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|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'.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Total recall October 11, 2005

By Ralph Blumenau TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Others have written what this book is about, so I will not try to describe the content of this book. Like the way he presented his mother, Amos Oz is a born story teller and a great painter with words. There is not a place, a person or an activity but that he presents it in such detail that you can actually SEE them. But I must say that often I found the detail excessive. He seems to have total recall, which is often rewarding but can at other times be a bit of a bore. He tells you the number of steps leading up into a house; he describes the smallest objects in a room without asking himself whether they are truly necessary to establish the room's atmosphere; he is inordinately fond of lists. Here, for instance, is a sentence describing his mother working silently and efficiently in the house: "She cooked, baked, did the washing, put the shopping away, ironed, cleaned, tidied, washed the dishes, sliced vegetables, kneaded dough." His aunts, who tell him about the family's life in Poland, also seem to have had total recall: that life is richly reconstructed, but again for my taste the pudding is often over-egged. Then he describes in minute detail and several times exactly which streets he or his mother would take from one location in Jerusalem to another. That might possibly be evocative for Jerusalemites who know the city; but if they know the city, do they need such a guide? These tiresome excesses are most in evidence when he describes his earliest years, until he is about eight years old; but those chapters take up about 2/3rds of this massive book (though his tale is never entirely chronological). Then, when he is eight, the War of Independence happens (excellent description of Jerusalem under siege), to be followed by the establishment of the State of Israel, and now the narrative becomes rather more concentrated and with fewer of the mannerisms of the earlier part. There is a magnificent description how, at the age of 15, this pale, immensely precocious cerebral but romantic youth escapes from the stifling intellectual world represented by his father and his father's friends, to live among the bronzed young gods on a kibbutz. He will stay on that kibbutz for the next 31 years, but his story ends with his adolescent admiration of the goddess who will become his wife five or six years later. And that is where, chronologically, his story ends (though throughout the book there are brief references to events in his later life).

This is a totally inadequate account of the book, and does not even touch on the thread that runs throughout: his relationship with his parents and their relationship with each other. Despite the irritations I sometimes felt, I was never tempted to put the book aside: it is far too interesting and well-written well-written for that.