Acclaimed Israeli author talks literature and politics

Israeli author Amos Oz opened a reception at the Israeli Ambassador's residence with a tribute to the Czech capital, where his mother studied before emigrating to Israel and meeting his father.

In Prague to publicize the first Czech translation of his book A Tale of Love and Darkness, the prolific Oz has published 33 books, including numerous novels, poems and essays. His work has been translated into 37 languages, and he has won the Israel Prize for Literature and the Primo Levi Prize, among others. Oz has also been awarded the Légion d'Honneur and is an annual contender for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Among the reception guests was writer Ivan Klíma, who praised Oz's ability to create complicated and real characters, singling out My Michael with its complex, dissatisfied narrator Hannah.

"I wrote My Michael, told from a woman's point of view, when I was 24 years old, and I thought I knew all about women." Oz replied. "Today, I would not dare."

Oz was born in East Jerusalem in 1939, nine years before the state of Israel. Oz's parents were Eastern-European Jewish intellectuals forced out of Europe by rising anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

"My parents loved Europe, and although I did not know it as a child, it was unrequited, one-sided love," Oz says.

The turbulence of East Jerusalem in the 1940s shaped Oz's fiction, and half his books are set within a mile of his childhood home. In A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz writes that, as a child, he hoped to "grow up to be a book." When asked what he meant, Oz smiles sadly.

"I wanted to be a book for my own safety," he says. "Children were being killed left, right and center."

When Oz was 12, his depressed mother committed suicide, an event he revisits in fiction rife with ill and dissatisfied female characters. He did not have a close relationship with his father, who saw Oz as "a red," and, in his mid-teens, Oz left home for Kibbitz Hulda, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It was at the kibbutz that Oz, born Amos Klausner, took his surname, meaning "strength" in Hebrew, and met his wife Nily, the daughter of the kibbutz librarian.

Disastrous as a manual laborer, Oz began writing and published his first book, the short story collection Where the Jackals Howl, in 1965. He wrote My Michael sitting in the bathroom of his two-room bungalow while his wife slept in the next room. The New York Times hailed the book as the "modern Israeli Madame Bovary." For more than 20 years, Oz continued living on the kibbutz, bringing up three children while publishing novels, short stories and essays. His family left the kibbutz in 1986 for Arad, a town between the Negev and Judean deserts. At age 46, Oz found himself owning property and carrying a check book for the first time.

In person, Oz, who turned 70 in May, still has what one journalist described as "kibbutz poster-boy good looks" and is fastidiously charming.

"I spend most of my life alone in my study talking to my ghosts, so this is a change," Oz says, examining the crowded room.

Yet it is clear the writer has lived most of his life in the public eye. When a photographer comes to take his picture, Oz rests his elbows on the chair-back and clasps his hands in the favored pose of statesmen. It is reminiscent of the writer-hero in his novel Rhyming Life and Death, who woos a waitress by dangling a cigarette between two fingers with an "intensely cultured look."

Oz carefully separates his work as a novelist from work as a commentator. He writes in blue or black ink - one color for novels, the other for political writing. All his writing grows out of his belief in the curative power of empathy.

"Reading can turn sadness into something less personal," Oz says. "It can't cure the sadness, but, suddenly, you realize you are not alone in the world."

While his novels have earned Oz a strong international reputation, his liberal politics and unswerving support for a two-state solution make him controversial with the Israeli Right.

"Mr. Ambassador will forgive me," he says, before diving into politics, "because he knows that I only represent myself, and even that only on a good day."

Natalia O'Hara can be reached at

features@praguepost.com

Natalia O'Hara can be reached at
features@praguepost.com