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Amos Oz
Author, A Tale of Love and Darkness and The Same Sea
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit Series Director
Barbara Lane: Your new book really entwines the personal and the political. Are those inextricably connected for you?Amos Oz: Well, I think for us Israelis, and perhaps for Jews of the last 200 years, history is not something that happens across the television screen from yourself. It is totally interwoven into everyone's individual, personal and intimate life. In fact, I grew up as a child poisoned with an overdose of history. The lives of my parents and my grandparents were distorted and burdened with an overdose of heavy and painful history. So in writing A Tale of Love and Darkness, it's not a kind of combining the personal with the widespread historical saga; in fact, the most personal and most intimate, the family story - father, mother, child, this piece of chamber music - is inseparable from the broader symphony, the historical saga, of the Israelis - not the Jews - in several decades: parents, grandparents, great-grandparents.
Lane: This book is very much a story, as you said, of your family - of your mother, who committed suicide when she was 38 years old; you were 12 years old. You say in this book that for your mother, Jerusalem was an exile. Can you talk about that?
Oz: Well, you see my mother in particular, but my father as well and my grandparents; they were not your Zionist revolutionary pioneers who came to the land of Israel to be born anew, to get suntanned and to change their lives and dance hora in the night. No, they were middle-class, European Jews; they were lovers of Europe; they were enthusiastic Europeans, at a time when no one else in Europe was a European except for Jews like my family; everyone else in Europe was a Bulgarian patriot, or an Irish patriot or a Ukrainian patriot.
They regarded themselves as Europeans. They loved the literatures; they were both great polyglots; they loved the histories, the art, the landscape, the climate, the atmosphere and above all the music - oh, they were hooked on European music - but they were not loved back.
For loving the whole of Europe, for being European, they were labeled cosmopolitans, parasites, rootless intellectuals. There are amongst you, I'm sure, people who know that those three pejoratives were the common vocabulary of Nazis and Communists: cosmopolitans, rootless intellectuals, parasites - my family. They lived in a Europe in the 1920s and 1930s where all the walls were covered with hateful graffiti: "Jews Go Back to Palestine" - just like the very same walls in Europe today are covered with graffiti: "Jews Out of Palestine." So, yes, they came to Jerusalem, my mother in particular, as if it was a bit of an exile. They tried to create an enclave of Europe in the heart of the Middle East - bookish, literate, musical, middle class, good manners, peace and quiet between two and four in the afternoon. It did not, and could not, quite work. For my mother this was too much, bearing in mind the longings and the horrors, the unrequited love for Europe.
If I may take another moment for this subject because it's important. If I liken Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s to the ship Titanic, my parents and grandparents were not among the people who drowned in the floaties when this Titanic drowned itself, no. They were those who were brutally thrown off the decks of the Titanic into the cold, dark, icy ocean while the dancing and the dining and the singing were still going on all the decks of the Titanic. Dancing to the music partly composed by Jews. Dining to a cultural menu partly created by Jews. And they carried the injury of their unrequited love all the way to Jerusalem, their unrequited love for Europe, their sense of rejection, longing and shame of their longing, anger and insult. Of course they never shared this with the child, not in front of the child, but this vibrates throughout A Tale of Love and Darkness. Among many loves and many darknesses, this is a tale about my parents' and grandparents' love for Europe, which ended in a great darkness.
Lane: It is such an irony that this Europe that they loved and revered - the culture, and as you said, everything about it - rejected them so horribly in the end. There is rejection in this book, but there is also a profound sense throughout of disappointment: your father's disappointment that he never achieved his intellectual aspirations; your mother's disappointment that she left her homeland. It just permeates the book. Can you expand on that theme of disappointment?
Oz: Yes, there are some layers of disappointment. Part of the disappointment has to do with the universal tragicomedy of immigrants, wherever they are. Not with Israel, not Jerusalem, not with Zionism - you know how it is. A family of immigrants comes to a new country. They try to forget and erase the old country but they crave for it: the language, the lullabies, the landscapes, the memoirs. So there is a certain ambivalence there. Then they are full of unrealistic, almost messianic hopes from the new homeland, the Promised Land, whichever this one is. Very soon the immigrant family discovers that they are not going to fulfill all their ambitions and aspirations and hopes, and immediately the child of the immigrant family - in my case the only child - has to bear all the hopes and ambitions. It's all put on his shoulders or her shoulders. The family becomes a kind of Cape Canaveral, and the child is the missile into which the family pumps all its energies and resources, so that one day this child will take the family's ambitions sky high. That's one layer.
Another one has to do again, not just with Israel and Zionism, but with the universal nature of dreams and aspirations. A Tale of Love and Darkness is focused primarily on the 1940s and the 1950s, the time before and the morning after. The euphoric, hopeful, messianic years when the Jewish people were standing by the maternity ward of Israel, hoping for Israel to become the most wonderful country upon the Earth; the most just one, the most peace-loving one, the most pacifist one, but at the same time a mighty one which will deter any enemy and at last punch enemies hard back in the jaw if they start trouble; the most biblical one, but also the most socialist one; the most enterprising one, but the most egalitarian one; and the most cultured one; and the most civilized one.
Of course, it could not deliver, even under ideal circumstances. Israel's middle name - I would say with all due reference to Charles Dickens - on its visiting card is "Great Expectations" - from her founding fathers and mothers and from the outside world. Then came the 1950s, the morning after: siege, war, animosity from the entire Muslim and Arab neighborhood, which attacked Israel militarily just moments after it became a nation on the midnight between May 14-15, 1948. Animosity, hostility, internal tensions, conflicts between various great visions: socialism and biblicality, social justice and militarism - it's had about it all the syndromes of the morning after.
Now, you know, forget Zionism, forget Israel. Israel is a dream come true, and as such it is destined to be a disappointment, because this is in the nature of dreams. The only way to keep a dream - any dream - wonderful and rosy and intact and flawless is never to try to live it out. The moment you fulfill a dream, whether this is planting a garden or writing a novel or building a nation or even living out a sexual fantasy, it's not as wonderful as it had been for the time it was only a fantasy. I am very philosophical about it. Israel was bound to disappoint many of the expectations of the founding fathers, the founding mothers and the outside world, partly because those expectations were mutually exclusive, partly because it's the nature of dreams. Yet, it has delivered quite a few spectacular achievements, because it is an existing fact, it's a reality; because the Hebrew language and the Hebrew culture and the Hebrew civilization are alive and thriving and vibrating with creativity and becoming significant on the world scene.
A Tale of Love and Darkness is about many loves which ended in darkness, but not every love ended in darkness. Let me add here a brief confession. I happen to love Israel even at times when I don't like it. I happen to love Israel even at moments when I cannot stand it, and recently there are many such moments. I love it because of its ferocious argumentativeness. Israel belongs not in an Ingmar Bergman film but in a Fellini movie. If you promise to take the following with a big grain of salt, I'm going to tell you that Israel is not a nation, Israel is not a country; it's a fiery collection of arguments, an assembly of 6.5 million citizens, 6.5 million prime ministers, messiahs and redeemers; everyone with his or her instant formula for immediate redemption; everyone talks, no one ever listens except for me. I listen sometimes; this is how I make a living. But I love this argumentativeness. A lot of it you will find in A Tale of Love and Darkness where, in the poor Chekhovian neighborhood of Kerem Avraham, small-time people, very embarrassed, very left-handed, uprooted, argue all the time about universal redemption and universal values and national deliverance and how to deal with the Arabs and how to be loved by everybody when they cannot even be loved by themselves. Hence the tragicomical dimension of this tale of love and darkness.
Lane: You spoke about the Hebrew language, and Hebrew was only revived as a modern language in the late 19th century when the Eastern European Jews were coming into Jerusalem. So as you were coming of age, this language was also coming of age and growing up. In fact, you tell a rather bittersweet anecdote in this novel about listening to a speech by Menachem Begin. Will you share that with us?
Oz: Well, I will share it with you, but not before I tell you that you just made a serious mistake, Barbara. You ask me about the Hebrew language, you get me going. Well, I may not be a zealot chauvinist for my country - I am not - but I am a hopeless chauvinist for the Hebrew language - which I regard as the most wonderful, musical instrument in the world - and the magic of its revival, after being as dead as ancient Greek or Latin for more than 17 centuries. Actually, I take it back, not dead, asleep, like a sleeping beauty who received the kiss of life not from one madman of a genius or genius of madness, but by the encounter of Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Jerusalem. With an influx of Ashkenazim immigrants in the end of the 19th century into the essentially Sephardim Jewish Jerusalem, where the only common possible language was the prayer book Hebrew, there was no other common language.
I can tell you the exact moment when Hebrew came to life, where was the kiss of life. It happened in the '90s of the 19th century, barely 110 years ago, when the first boy in 1,700 years whispered to the same girl, or the first girl to the same boy, "I love you" in Hebrew, because she was Ashkenazim, he Sephardim, or vice versa; I hope the two of them had a way with one another. I hope they lived happily ever after, because they revived the language, which for years was in the synagogue, at the Seder table, but not in intimate circumstances, and in no time Hebrew became an explosion. It became an amazing phenomenon of literature and creativity. Every day now people fly jumbo-jets in this language, people conduct heart transplants in this language, people launch satellites in this language and people create a magnanimous body of literature, poetry, ideological and theological debate in this language - this all happened before my eyes.
When I was a kid in the 1940s, the number of Hebrew speakers everywhere was about 300,000. That's quite a steep climb, from the few dozen in Jerusalem 110 years ago to 300,000, but all of them were under the age of 45. So much so that I feared that when I turned 45 I would wake up speaking Yiddish one morning. I thought it was something that came with old age, like gray hair or wrinkles. Today, ladies and gentlemen, from a few dozen a hundred years ago, from the 300,000 speakers 60 years ago, 8 million people speak Hebrew every day. This includes Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs and many Palestinians who have to speak Hebrew in order to scrap a living, and hundreds of thousands of Hebrew speakers who live outside of Israel - for reasons I'll never understand.
And the language is ferociously alive, like Elizabethan English. A poet or a writer of Hebrew can still legislate in the language, help shape it. When I say "like Elizabethan English" I am not suggesting that every contemporary poet is a Shakespeare - we have no more than half a dozen of those in Tel Aviv right now. But the temptation is there. I have myself invented one or two Hebrew words by adding prefixes and suffixes to existing words, and I had one of those words come back to me from a taxi driver who had no idea that I was the proud parent of that word. That's as close to immortality as a mortal can ever hope to get.
Now for the episode. When I was a kid of 12 or so, very ferociously right wing and nationalistic and an addicted fan of Menachem Begin, the leader of the right-wing Irgun and the Herut Party - which evolved into the Likud Party - my grandfather used to take me to meetings of that party in the Edison Cinema, where Begin would deliver fiery, highly rhetorical, nationalistic, upright speeches - but Begin had a vocabulary problem. He talked about the race of armament in the Middle East, and the Hebrew word he used for armament was the word my generation used for sexual encounter, or the four-letter word really. He, poor Begin, didn't know this. So he went on lamenting about the fact that the Americans are arming the Arabs, the British are arming the Arabs, the Russians, the French - no one is arming Israel. "If I were prime minister," he said, "everybody would be arming us day and night." I exploded with laughter. My right-wing grandfather dragged me out by the ear, slapped me hard on the face twice, and that's how the right wing lost me forever.
Lane: You've said about Hebrew that it's not a very intimate language. You write all your books in Hebrew, and they're translated for you, yet your novels are very intimate; this book is very intimate. Explain that dichotomy.
Oz: It's not that Hebrew is not intimate; it's that for many, many generations it was not used for intimate purposes. For me, it's the one and only language. I am the child of great polyglots. My father could read 16 or 17 languages; he spoke 11, admittedly all of them with a heavy Russian accent. My mother could speak five or six languages. Yet they insisted on teaching me only Hebrew and no other language, not for chauvinistic reasons but for fear. They were afraid that if I had even one European language - I'm talking about the 1940s - I might eventually be seduced by the deadly charms of Europe. I'll go to Europe and catch my death. Which is why the first non-Hebrew words I learned to pronounce, at the age of seven, apart from yes and no, were the English words "British go home," which is what we Jewish kids in Jerusalem used to shout as we were throwing stones at the British patrols in what must have been the first genuine Jerusalem intifada - talking about ironies of history. So, for me, Hebrew is the obvious and only and beloved musical instrument. It is as intimate as can be. I dream in Hebrew, and I laugh and cry in Hebrew, and I count in Hebrew and I even arm in Hebrew.
Lane: Your translator for this book is Nicholas de Lange, and he's also translated a number of your novels. Can you tell us about your relationship with him and how that works in the translations?
Oz: Nicholas de Lange is a wonderful translator, and translation is a great art. Unfortunately, he has to take a lot of suffering from me because the English translation is the only one translation of my books that can hurt. My books are translated into 34 languages; for some reason, the Korean translation never hurts me, nor the Finish or the Catalan. With English, Nicholas and I work together - it says on the jacket on some of my books that they were "translated by Nicholas de Lange, in collaboration with the author." It's a lie. They were translated by Nicholas de Lange with interruptions from the author, because my English is barely sufficient to tell him I think this or that suggestion for translating a certain idiom is wrong. But when he says to me, "Then what is the right English word for this?" I say, "English is your department, sir, not mine."
However, I believe that translating a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. This can be done and can be done very successfully, on one strict condition: Never, ever, try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. It's a different musical instrument, which is why I always say to Nicholas de Lange and to people who translate me into Chinese or into Portuguese, "For God's sake, be unfaithful in order to be loyal."
Lane: This is sort of a two-part question. Your father's name was Klausner; you were born Amos Klausner. When you decided, I believe at the age of 15, to go and live on a kibbutz, you defied your father; he did not want you to make this move. I want you to address that. You changed your name at that time to Oz, rejecting him in a way and forging a new identity, you say, "becoming the new Hebrew man." So if you could address, first, the rejection of your father and what the disagreement was and then also who this new Hebrew man was.
Oz: When my mother killed herself when I was 12, I hated her. I was so mad with her that I wanted to kill her for killing herself. I was totally blind and deaf to her own misery and suffering. I treated her as if she ran off with a lover. How could she leave behind her - without even leaving a note - such a devoted and loving husband and such a lovable wunderkind? Then I was angry with my father: "You idiot. How on earth could you lose - you good for nothing - such a beautiful, deep, subtle, gentle woman?" Then I hated myself in turn. I thought, Mothers love their kids, even in the realm of animals. Even the mothers of criminals love their kids; even the mothers of Nazis love their kids. My mother did not love me or else she would not walk away without leaving a note, so there must be something very terrible about me, something monstrous. Maybe if I was a better pupil at school and brought home better grades, maybe if I took out the garbage every night after supper, or if I washed behind my ears without cheating, as she always wanted me to do, she would still be here.
Two years later, I rebelled against my father's word and against the entire Jerusalem milieu. I wanted to become everything they were not. My father was right wing, middle class, intellectual, bookish, pale and totally incompetent with his hands. I decided to move to a kibbutz, to change my name from Klausner to Oz, which means courage, strength, determination - everything I needed very badly and didn't really have when I was a runaway kid, so the name was whistling in the dark. I decided I would go to a kibbutz. I would become a simple, uncomplicated, unintellectual, soldier/tractor driver. He was short; I would become tall. He was pale; I would become suntanned. I'd be everything he was not.
Of course, now I know that all rebellions tend to go at least semicircle. Now I know that he wanted to be the new type of Jew: brave, silent, not very talkative, totally devoted to working on the land, suntanned, masculine. In doing this, I was actually fulfilling part of my parents' secret aspirations. They wanted to beget such a generation. Today, I sit in a room full of books and I write even more books, thus fulfilling the other part of their aspirations for me. There was no escape. Either way I was actually playing into the hands of their dreams and fantasies and hopes - except in politics perhaps. If my father would come back to life, he would give me a dressing down for my politics. He would probably regard me today as a dangerous Red. But there should be some argument.
Argumentative is also their heritage. Everybody argued in Jerusalem, then and now. In this respect, as I told you, we are an argumentative society, an open-air seminary. If I may add to that about the argumentativeness. It's not for nothing that Jews never had a pope, nor could they have one. If anyone ever calls himself or herself a pope of the Jews, everybody would be slapping this pope right on the back saying, "Hi pope, you don't know me, I don't know you, but my grandfather and your uncle used to do business together back in Minsk or in Casablanca, and therefore you'll be quiet for 10 minutes and let me tell you once and for all what it is that God really wants of us." This is the anarchistic gene in the Jewish heritage, which I love dearly; it's no garden of roses; it's sound and fury, but I love it. Judaism, after all, has always been an open-ended game of interpretations, counter-interpretations, reinterpretations, subversive interpretations; that's what we are all about, and that's what Israel is really about, away from the fictitious world of CNN.
Lane: You stayed on this kibbutz for 30 years. You married, you raised three children there, yet the kibbutz - it's not as strong as it was. There was a time when American kids were going over to Israel and living on the kibbutz and working on the kibbutz - what's happened, and how has it changed? What's the state of the kibbutz today?
Oz: This is not a very good time for kibbutz; this is not a very good time for any socialist or egalitarian phenomenon or movement in the world. With the sinking of the Soviet Union, apparently every other enterprise or thinking or line of ideas in the egalitarian direction suffered the great shock, and the radical Darwinistic philosophies seem to celebrate - not for long; there will be a reaction. I don't know how soon. I can't tell you if this will happen in my lifetime. But all around me, in middle-class Israel - and you'll tell me if this is true for San Francisco or for the Bay Area as well - in middle-class Israel, again and again, I see people working harder than they really should be working, in order to make more money than they really need, in order to buy things they don't really want, in order to impress people they don't really like. There will be a response. Now I'm not sure this response will take exactly the form of a traditional kibbutz, and people will be dancing hora again, probably not. But a certain attempt to create a voluntary, societal cell - a small community, with a tight sense of mutual responsibility and sharing - up to a point, I think this will come back. I think when this comes back, the kibbutz will be an exciting role model - notwithstanding the mistakes and errors which the founding fathers and mothers of the kibbutz have committed being overzealous and overenthusiastic about egalitarianism.
Lane: You said you went to the kibbutz in part to escape the intellectualism of your family, yet, ironically of course, the kibbutz is where you became a writer. I was interested to read that it was Sherwood Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio who opened that up for you.
Oz: Part of the irony is that when I came to the kibbutz I thought I landed on a different planet - different kind of Jews, the 180-degree opposition of bookish, talkative, argumentative Jerusalem; the new Jews: suntanned, silent, devoted and hard working - only to discover very soon that although they were suntanned all right, and although they were milking cows and plowing the land, they were nonetheless arguing day and night with a Yiddish sing-song, if not about the same subjects as they argued in Jerusalem. They were arguing about Marxism versus social democracy, Stalin versus Trotsky, revolution versus evolution - but arguing day and night. Although I wanted to give up writing altogether - it's not respectable for a tractor driver to secretly write - I could not. Like some other teenage vices, it's easier to decide that you will never do it again than to actually never do it again.
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