Every day at 5:30 a.m., Amos Oz takes a walk in the desert. The jackals in the caves are only just rising. The newspapers, heralding yesterday’s bloodbath, have not yet arrived.
“The desert is a great humbler,” says the author once dubbed the “Zionist Orwell.” “It helps me look at everything in proportion.”
In a country teeming with noise, the quiet afforded by the town of Arad in the northern Negev is a valuable asset. During the first Gulf War, Iraq launched a missile that narrowly missed the desert town. But mostly Arad is removed from the Israel of headlines and news flashes.
The desert would appear the ideal habitat for a figure often regarded as a latter-day prophet. But the arid land is also fertile terrain for a novelist. “It is because so much of my work is set against a Jerusalem background that I need my distance from it,” says Oz, a self-described “reluctant optimist with no timetable for my optimism.”
His political life has conferred on him the identity of a modern-day seer. But when that tag is applied to his novels, Oz bristles.
“If I write a book about a son borrowing his father’s car for the weekend, having a beer and crashing into the traffic lights, half the world will say: ‘This is about the Palestinians, the occupation, the settlements and Sharon,'” he says.
Oz will be making several Bay Area appearances in early December. His latest work, the autobiographical “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” is a portrait of his childhood defined by the birth pangs of the nascent Israeli state. Oz offers up his family as an emblem of the early Israeli psyche.
His father, Arieh Klausner, was a devoted and rigorous scholar who never attained the lectureship he so desperately craved in a country brimming with overqualified academics. Oz’s melancholic mother, Fania, hailed from an affluent family in Ukraine, and ached with nostalgia for what she recalled as the refined, genteel existence of her youth.
“[Jerusalem] was an invisible cathedral of yearnings and longings — longings for forbidden Europe, longings for the kibbutzim and the pioneering life, longings for the intellectual intensity of Tel Aviv which actually existed in Jerusalem but somehow did not feel real enough. Real life was always elsewhere.”
The governing presence of “A Tale of Love and Darkness” is the ghost of Fania, who committed suicide when her son was 12.
“I thought it was irresponsible,’ he says. ‘This was just not the way to behave. If I left home for two hours without leaving a note, I would get punished.”
The book’s tragicomic tone reflects the dual nature of his mother’s death. “I wanted every page to be at the same time comic and tragic; comic because she died a very provincial death,” he says. “She died of unfulfilled romantic dreams, of an overdose of romantic aspirations, of the love of arts and the frustration of that love.”
Oz never discussed his mother’s pathology and suicide with his father. But the brooding, dreamy figure of Fania continued to stalk his female protagonists, most famously Hannah Gonen, the heroine of “My Michael,” who incarnates Oz’s mother in her sentimental longing for death.
Two years after her suicide, Oz split with his father for the pioneering life of the kibbutz, to reinvent himself as a “new Jew,” free from the neurosis and intellectualism of the refugee camp that was mid-century Jerusalem.
“My father’s initial reaction was one of total shock and embargo,” he says.
A compromise eventually was brokered, formalized in writing, whereby Oz would attend a kibbutz closer to Jerusalem and complete his secondary education. “Hence my political faith in compromises to this very day,” Oz notes.
But the name he signed was not Klausner but Oz, clinching the break by replacing his European surname with the Hebrew word for courage. “I needed courage, determination, daring and I didn’t have it, hence the name Oz.”
Oz stayed at kibbutz Hulda for 30 years, only moving to Arad when his son’s asthma called for the dry desert air. By raising his family on the kibbutz, Oz hoped to insulate his children from the afflictions that coursed through the milieu of his childhood.
“Growing up in Jerusalem meant carrying on your shoulder the yoke of a huge historical frustration of many generations, and a huge uncertainty about the future and fear,” Oz says. “It was like living on the edge of the abyss. All this I hope I have spared from my children.”
Where he’ll speak
Amos Oz will speak at noon Sunday, Dec. 5, at the 10th Biennial Conference of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California St. Information: (212) 564 6711, ext. 303, or [email protected].
That same day, he will appear at 7:30 p.m. in conversation with Michael Krasny, host of KQED-FM’s Forum, at CenterStage, Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, 200 N. San Pedro Road, San Rafael. The event is part of the Artists & Authors series. The event is part of the Pell Program of Jewish Culture with additional support from the Koret Foundation. Tickets: $20 public, $15 JCC members, $10 students. Information: (415) 444-8000 or www.marinjcc.org/centerstage/index.html.
On Tuesday evening, Dec. 7, Oz will appear in conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit Series director, at the Commonwealth Club, 595 Market St, 2nd floor, S.F. Check-in at 5:45 p.m., program at 6:30 p.m. Tickets: $12 members, $18 non-members. Information: (415) 597-6700 or www.commonwealthclub.org.
“A Tale of Love and Darkness” by Amos Oz, (544 pages, Harcourt, $26).