2017/31 Amos Oz: A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003) ****

Amos Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem in 1939 but changed his name during adolescence after leaving home to live in a kibbutz, soon after his mother's death. He spent 31 years in an institution distrusted by his conservative parents, not merely for socialist principles but the movement seemed close to Stalinist ideologies, which had mostly not ended well for most Jews. Vigorous, idealistic, sunburned young(ish) workers strove together for a better world on collective farms.

This fascinating autobiography is primarily a story of a childhood spent in Palestine, which was divided with great bitterness from 1948 to form the newly-created state of Israel. This is understandable given the inevitable dispossession of Arabs who had owned and occupied the territory for 1900 years following the Diaspora. Theodor Herzl, a product of the Austro Hungarian Empire regarded as the main founder of Zionism, did not live to to see his idea become reality in what was the Ottoman Empire when he conceived it. He died in 1904, aged 44.

The Jews of Eastern Europe, who made up the majority of the new settlers, began to arrive in earnest from the late 1920s. Wikipedia suggests that in 1922 the Jewish population of Palestine was about 84,000 or 13%. It doubled in 10 years and by 1946 had reached 608,000. David Ben Gurion, who alarmed a 20-year old Amos by summoning him for an early morning chat. Amos had  written a letter taking issue with an article about Spinoza by the veteran leader. In his memoir Oz agrees with Isaiah Berlin that Ben Gurion was a self-taught Polish peasant, not an intellectual.  In 1948 Ben Gurion, who lived in Tel Aviv wrote in his diary his impressions of the Jews in Jerusalem:

"20% normal people, 20 privileged (university etc.), 60% weird (provincial, medieval etc.)."

Hundreds of thousand more refugees waited in camps for displaced persons in Europe. Many of those waiting for relatives to arrive in Palestine gradually concluded that their families would never arrive. Wikipedia estimates that the total world Jewish population prior to World War II was a little less than 17 million, of whom 6 million were systematically murdered.

Although the kibbutzim were mostly enthusiastic about returning to the land of their ancestors, the same cannot be said for Amos's family, Russian and Polish Jews who found living in much reduced circumstances in tiny flats in a hot, dusty alien country very unsettling. His maternal grandma Shlomit found the place filthy and full of germs, leading her to a sustained assault of cleaning and disinfection. Grandpa Alexander, her husband, loyally supported her in this campaign but after she died he resumed his lifelong preoccupation of charming and loving women, his secret being to listen attentively and give them the affirmation that they sought. He continued in this noble endeavour until his nineties, a man from Odessa of great charm and elegance.

Amos's mother and father were intellectuals, although in Jerusalem his mother was only able to teach a little privately, despite her degree from the University of Prague; his father worked for decades in the periodicals section of the university library. Amos was a precocious reader and lover of stories but it was only in Kibbutz Hulda that he found courage to write about ordinary people and places, inspired by the down home tales of Sherwood Anderson. It was also in the kibbutz that a very lovely and experienced older woman initiated him and enabled him to escape the torments of sexual feelings that filled him with guilt through adolescence.

There is a lot of repetition in this book, some no doubt for narrative effect, but it feels as though many other earlier essays have been stitched together. The translation from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange is excellent. As so often the events of his childhood resonate down the years and the book returns again and again to his mother's suicide, in her thirties. His father's parallel infidelities and early remarriage also affected him deeply.