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Amos Oz: A Story of Love
and Darkness
Yosef Oren
Only after fifty years of silence
on the subject, did Amos Oz begin to face his life’s pain: being
orphaned from his mother, Fania, who committed suicide when he was
twelve and a half years old. At first he wrote about it in an implied
manner in “That Sea” (1999) and now openly at length in the
autobiography Story about Love and Darkness. The name of the book
promised a composition built as a diptych, whose first part talks about
the love he received from his mother during her life and the second part
talks about the darkness that prevailed in his life after her suicide.
But instead of being satisfied with the moving, intimate story of the
promised diptych, with the description of the way as a child he
perceived the relationship between his parents and how he dealt with his
mother’s suicide, soon after the tragedy and during the course of the
following years, Oz included in the volume five other compositions:
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A family tree that amply explores
the history of the Klauzner and Mussman families, his parents’
families, with details and descriptions he gathered from relatives and
other people’s memoirs.
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A satirical composition on his
father’s uncle, Prof. Joseph Klauzner, and the family circle, academic
and literary, which clustered around him and worshiped him and his
nationalistic opinions.
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A compilation of independent
stories that, had they been assembled from their distribution
throughout the autobiography, could have made another volume of
fiction. Most outstanding among them are the stories about his
experiences as a boy in mandatory Jerusalem and during the War of
Independence, the story about Grandma Shulamit’s zealousness for
cleanliness and the story about his first sexual experience with a
promiscuous woman who was engaged by Kibbutz Hulda as a hired
kindergarten teacher.
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A volume somewhat slimmer than
the former ones with chapters designated to educate readers,
especially literary critics among them, how to read literature in
general and his works in particular.
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Another slim yet clearly
political volume, in which Amos Oz relates how he turned from being “a
nationalistic boy” in the captivity of the fanatics in his family
(Prof. Klauzner, his grandfather Alexander and his father) into one of
the distinguished thinkers of the Left in Israeli society. In it, Oz
delineated his well-known doctrine, in which Israel is defined as the
occupier of Palestinian territories and is exhorted to withdraw to the
borders it had until 1967, borders that, as we know, were not
respected by Arab countries even before the Six Day War.
In fact,
Oz combined in the autobiography five additional books that weakened the
intensity of the chapters of the promised central story and eventually
produced a volume that contains 600 pages instead of a modest, compact
volume of about two hundred pages of the story about love and darkness.
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