Touch the Water, Touch the Wind [Paperback]

Amos Oz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 1991

Oz has crafted an intricate tale of people constantly seeking escape from a hostile world, an escape symbolized on its highest level by the watchmaker Pomeranz, a mathematician and musician. By the power of his music, he causes the arid earth to turn into a moist womb that receives him and his wife not in death but in immortality. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Editorial Reviews

Review

In both My Michael (1972) and Elsewhere Perhaps (1973) Oz has hinted symbolically at a metaphysical extension of contemporary Israeli lives by taking a fleeting cognizance of the curious incongruities of the country itself with its mix of men and myth, soughing wind under limitless skies. Here although he deals in part with stone-hard artifacts like streets and shops, kibbutz halls and shrieking bombs - he adds a frame of folk/allegorical fantasy. Elisha, the gentle watchmaker's son, recognizes that time is but "an affectation of the mind" as he shivers and starves in a Polish forest away from the Nazis. As naturally as Chagall's creatures amusingly solve gravitational entrapment, Elisha levitates - above "Germans, forests, huts, ghosts, wolves. . ." playing mouth organ music in the night. While his wife, Stefa, queen of Polish intellectuals, skims through other implausibilities to become a kind of comic Barbarella of Stalinist officialdom. After several changes of identity, Elisha at last in a kibbutz produces - among new and old social idealists and eternal crones at their gossip - a mathematical answer to the problem of infinity. Elisha and Stefa are in the end reunited but then disappear - to become as insubstantial as any human beings who reach too far off the earth to escape its corrosive veins of evil. A masterful aggregate of philosophical speculation, witty social commentary and solid story telling. (Kirkus Reviews )

About the Author

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the author of numerous works of fiction and essays. His international awards include the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, and the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Israel.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (March 28, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156907720
• ISBN-13: 978-0156907729
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,119,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an eccentric look at the destruction, November 15, 2007

By 

Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Touch the Water, Touch the Wind (Paperback)

An eccentrically lyrical novel of the Holocaust, Oz treats the destruction of Europe's Jews in a mythical vein. The main character is drawn as a cross current between science and religion; cast as a Christ-like figure, his ability to defy the laws of nature is balanced by his rationalism. In keeping with the title, the novel has a strange kind of levitation on the level of language; a kind of realism, it skims the surface of the reality it paints, giving the reader no deep insight into the psychology of the characters. This is not a flaw in Oz's writing. Rather, it is a lesson in metaphysics and mysticism. Touch the Water Touch the Wind is a mediation of what language can and can't explain in human experience.