A majority of this autobiography is devoted to Oz's childhood and the stories of his parents and their respective early years spent in distant Eastern Europe before they were forced to flee to Israel. Oz uses several odd means of telling his life story - in first-person, in the third-person voice of his aunts and others, and sometimes through seemingly dreamlike sequences, all used to great effect in hypnotically transporting the reader to the colorful Jerusalem streets of Oz's childhood. Some reviewers state that this book focuses too heavily on his early childhood but that is precisely what I like most and what I believe this book is supposed to be about. This life story quietly revolves around and pays tribute to Amos Oz's mother who passed away when he was twelve.

Amos Oz is one of Israel's best known novelists; some label him as Israel's "number one". Any new book by Oz gets the immediate attention of everyone, gets translated to several languages and hits the no. 1 spot in the bestsellers list almost immediately. Indeed, Oz has become an icon in Israel to whom many turn to, not only to discuss literary matters but also get his opinion on politics, society and life in general. As my wife says, he has become a "sacred cow", elevated to a status where it has become extremely difficult for any critic to harm sales of his books in any significant way.

I read A Tale of Love and Darkness (in Hebrew) during my trip in New Zealand and it accompanied me throughout the journey. It is an autobiography that Oz started writing shortly after he turned 60, at the end of the previous century. It tells mainly the story of his childhood in Jerusalem, growing up during the time Israel was being formed (Oz was 9 when Israel gained independence). Although the book covers many aspects of his life, the one overriding theme surfacing over and over again is the suicide of his mother when he was 12. This event shaped Oz's life and led to the abrupt change he embarked upon two years later: the move from the book-centric, scholarly life of his father in Jerusalem to the freedom and agricultural life of Kibbutz Hulda.

Oz's writing is at times long-winded and pompous. Even daily, mundane events are recounted in excruciating detail that sometimes make the reader wonder whether they indeed made such an impact on his life to deserve such attention. Despite this, Oz manages to combine tragedy and comedy in his family's saga and his occasional self-effacing manner make the reader forgive him for his long-windedness. Throughout the book, the leading figures of Israel as a young nation pop up: Bialik, Tchernikhowsky, Agnon, Ben-Gurion and Yadin all came and went in Oz's childhood.

The book is more of a memoir than an autobiography. The storyline is not linear and Oz repeats some events several times. If we ignore the fact that Oz wrote this book and thus remove the "sacred cow" factor, the book is an enjoyable read and contributes to the understanding of how Ashkenazi Jews coped with their new life in the Middle East.

This review was published in The Australian, August 16, 2008. Greg Sheridan is the Foreign Editor.
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Memoirs are made of this

OPINION: Greg Sheridan | August 16, 2008

A FEW years ago I experienced a severe addiction to travel literature.

With the contemporary serious novel in such a mess, travel writing, like biography, offers many of the traditional pleasures of the novel: story, character, good dialogue, development, resolution. But I can't say I discovered any great literature there, much as I enjoyed Bill Bryson's wit and Paul Theroux's misanthropy.

Now I am immersed in a frenetic bout of memoir reading and here the story is different.

When Tom Wolfe was promoting the new journalism, which has been with us several decades now, his essential insight was to bring the techniques of the novelist to bear on journalism: exploring the subjective elements of a story, the characters' inner lives and interior monologues, with the advantage that the events had actually happened.

A novelist's memoir can achieve this supremely. A Tale of Love and Darkness is the childhood memoir of Amos Oz, Israel's greatest novelist and surely soon a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This is an incomparably good book. Perhaps it is the best book I have read. It tells of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1930s and '40s. Oz conceives life as one part comedy, one part tragedy, one part humdrum, quotidian concreteness, and if you are Jewish, the chance always of utter disaster.

His life proceeds against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the birth of Israel. Oz is an only child and his life is also shaped by the suicide of his mother when he is 12. This colossal roadblock dominates and shapes the book and yet does not distort the loving portrait of his father, a frustrated academic, out of his depth and at his wits' end with his wife's melancholy.

Oz's technical accomplishments in this book are dazzling. He writes of his grandfather:

It was not easy for him to go out. Grandma had a highly developed, super-sensitive radar screen on which she kept track of us all: at any given moment she could check the inventory, to know precisely where each of us was, Lonia at his desk in the National Library on the fourth floor of the Terra Sancta Building, Zussya at Cafe Atara, Fania sitting in the B'nai B'rith Library, Amos playing with his best friend Eliyahu next door at Mr Friedmann the engineer's, in the first building on the right. Only at the edge of her screen, behind the extinguished galaxy, in the corner from which her son Zyuzya, Zyuzinka, with Malka and little Daniel, whom she had never seen or washed, were supposed to flicker back at her, all she could see by day or night was a terrifying black hole.

This passage is instructive. First, there is a lovely metaphor for domestic life. How many grandmas have their perfect family radar screens? Then, everyone is mentioned by name. There is the accumulation of small details of location that give the passage life. But suddenly, at the end, the shocking reality of the Holocaust explodes this domestic tableau, as it does intermittently throughout these beautiful memories.

Almost every page of this book contains an observation or metaphor so striking you cannot let it go, or rather it will not let you go. Oz writes: "Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the 19th century."

The contrast, indeed conflict, of east European Jews trying to recreate an idealised Europe, one free of anti-Semitism, in the hot, dusty climate of Israel, surrounded by hostile Arabs, is mined by Oz as much for comedy as tragedy. And there is endless comic delight in the crazy clash of expectation with reality. For bookish, intellectual, urban Jews such as Oz and his family, the kibbutz pioneers were a new kind of Jew. Oz mocks his own earnest idealisation of kibbutz pioneers, yet somehow affirms it as well:

Tough, warm-hearted, though of course silent and thoughtful, young men and strapping, straightforward young women ... I pictured these pioneers as strong, serious, self-contained people, capable of sitting around in a circle and singing songs of heart-rending longing, or songs of mockery, or songs of outrageous lust ... (people) who could ride wild horses or wide-tracked tractors, who spoke Arabic, who knew every cave and wadi, who had a way with pistols and hand grenades, yet read poetry and philosophy.

Oz is free of self-pity. Instead there is a generous human solidarity and understanding for everyone. But there are passages of aching melancholy and pain. The night the UN votes to establish Israel is the happiest night imaginable. Though it too is tinged with fear, as the Jews of Jerusalem are always in dread of a second holocaust. But the recognition of the Zionist dream is a fulfilment of generations' desires.

In all his life, Oz never sees his father weep, except that night. The father crawls into bed beside young Amos and tousles his hair:

Then he told me in a whisper what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some gentile boys did to him at his Polish school in Vilna, and the girls joined in too, and the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father, Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down on to the paving stones and removed his trousers too in the middle of the playground, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying that the Jews were all so-and-sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing.

Now, the father tells Amos, people may bully you, but not because you are a Jew: "Not that. Never again. From tonight that's finished here. For ever." Most of the book is not political in that sense. It's full of jokes, though its genius is to blend comedy and tragedy. Oz recounts how as a kid he talked all the time, but that was fine because everyone in Jerusalem talked all the time. A professor tells Oz that the odds of there being an afterlife, as there is no conclusive evidence either way, are 50-50. For a central European Jew in the generation of Hitler, those chances of survival are not at all bad.

When a great novelist writes a memoir with all the technique of the novel at its best, you get a superior art form. If I could recommend just one book to tell you something about the human condition, this would be it.

Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness is a memoir of his life and the life of his family up until the time of his mother's suicide at the age of 38 in the early 1950s. Oz's mother's suicide, never treated fictionally in his other work (as far as I can recall) is treated here with great care and thoroughness: there is anger, guilt, shame, sadness, loss, a sense of regret, and penetrating understanding. Without a doubt the book is strongest when Oz discusses his mother and her family. His mother, brought up on a romantic, Hebrew education in Rovno, was not ready for the tawdriness of life in Palestine, "the rough terrain of everyday life, diapers, husbands, migraines, queues, smells of moth balls and kitchen sinks." The story of his mother's mental decline and suicide is also the story of the convergence and divergences of Jewish life in the 20th century; the outline of the gap between the real and the ideal of the Zionist dream. That said, A Tale of Love and Darkness is generally overwritten. There is much useless repetition here which drags down the trajectory of the memoir. I do not recommend this work as the first work of Amos Oz to be read, but the last. It makes for an instructive book end with Where the Jackal's Howl and Other Stories on the other side.

You may not be able to take the shtetl out of the Jews. This is a moving and beautifully written book about life in Jerusalem among recent immigrants to Israel from the 1930's through the war of independence. Even the most nationalistic Zionists -- followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky -- found it difficult to be anything but Europeans. Perhaps the Jews should have insisted on part of Poland-Lithuania-Ukraine as their homeland; it would have been an easier adjustment than the Levant which they had lost contact with for at least 2000 years. I realise this is what the fanatical president of Iran is currently saying, but it may in the long run have been more true than not.

Amos Oz lived among nationalistic Zionists; his uncle was Joseph Klausner, a distinguished historiand and partisan of the Zionist Revisionists. Oz, however, in the end reject their integral nationalism, but we don't know what he would put in its place. Indeed, with the Palestinian Arabs still refusing compromise and a live and let live relationship with the Israelis, the Israelis have probably no choice but to pursue the integral nationalism of resistance and uncompromising rigor. It's a tragedy.

Others have written what this book is about, so I will not try to describe the content of this book. Like the way he presented his mother, Amos Oz is a born story teller and a great painter with words. There is not a place, a person or an activity but that he presents it in such detail that you can actually SEE them. But I must say that often I found the detail excessive. He seems to have total recall, which is often rewarding but can at other times be a bit of a bore. He tells you the number of steps leading up into a house; he describes the smallest objects in a room without asking himself whether they are truly necessary to establish the room's atmosphere; he is inordinately fond of lists. Here, for instance, is a sentence describing his mother working silently and efficiently in the house: "She cooked, baked, did the washing, put the shopping away, ironed, cleaned, tidied, washed the dishes, sliced vegetables, kneaded dough." His aunts, who tell him about the family's life in Poland, also seem to have had total recall: that life is richly reconstructed, but again for my taste the pudding is often over-egged. Then he describes in minute detail and several times exactly which streets he or his mother would take from one location in Jerusalem to another. That might possibly be evocative for Jerusalemites who know the city; but if they know the city, do they need such a guide? These tiresome excesses are most in evidence when he describes his earliest years, until he is about eight years old; but those chapters take up about 2/3rds of this massive book (though his tale is never entirely chronological). Then, when he is eight, the War of Independence happens (excellent description of Jerusalem under siege), to be followed by the establishment of the State of Israel, and now the narrative becomes rather more concentrated and with fewer of the mannerisms of the earlier part. There is a magnificent description how, at the age of 15, this pale, immensely precocious cerebral but romantic youth escapes from the stifling intellectual world represented by his father and his father's friends, to live among the bronzed young gods on a kibbutz. He will stay on that kibbutz for the next 31 years, but his story ends with his adolescent admiration of the goddess who will become his wife five or six years later. And that is where, chronologically, his story ends (though throughout the book there are brief references to events in his later life).

This is a totally inadequate account of the book, and does not even touch on the thread that runs throughout: his relationship with his parents and their relationship with each other. Despite the irritations I sometimes felt, I was never tempted to put the book aside: it is far too interesting and well-written well-written for that.

I was very disappointed with this book. Since there where such good recommendations I hoped for a book that would grip my attention. But after 70 or so pages I could not continue, I found it desperately BORING. Just some endless summation of names and streets. May be some friend of mine will be happy with this present.

This memoir is a triumph on multiple levels. First, it is the story of a young man's growing up in a period of history fraught with tragedy and hope -- the time just after the Holocaust and before the State of Israel was founded and took root. Oz blends the personal and the political in a seamless manner. His account of his adolescent sexual fumblings and his eventual initiation into sexual activity by an older woman is both psychologically convincing and utterly hilarious. Second, this is the account of a new nation, Israel, struggling to be born and to forge its identity. Oz grew up as an acolyte of the political Zionist Right; it is remarkable that he moved decisively to the Left and remained there. He is a Zionist who feels deep and genuine empathy with the Arab populace. Third, many reviewers have not pointed out that this is a literary memoir. From almost the day that he learned to read, Oz devoured the classic and not-so-classic works of world literature -- whatever had been translated into Hebrew. In some ways, this book is Oz's effort to acknowledge his literary ancestors and repay his literary debts. The language is lyrical and the sense of history is pervasive. Altogether an outstanding book.

In "A Tale of Love and Darkness" the Israeli novelist and political essayist reflects on his childhood. Oz tells of a morning writing the book in Arad, he is working on chapter 36, and says: "I don't know what can contribute to the progress of the story, because as yet I have no idea where this story wants to go, ....". Certainly, Oz is trying to understand and come to terms with his childhood, but I think his primary motivation may be even simpler: to better recall his youth and the people who were important to him, for Oz makes clear he does not have an exceptional memory, and that sometimes, like an archaeologist, he is recreating a memory from fragments (and whatever help he can get from other first person accounts of the time).
What made reading this book such a memorable experience? Certainly, Oz is a talented writer. It is unlikely that someone who is not a novelist could write prose as well, or recreate conversations and scenes as well. Oz's childhood was eventful, and at least in his hands, his family life is interesting. Oz offers a feel for a time and place (lower middle class life in Jerusalem in the years 1939-1948) as well as fascinating stories about his ancestors, particularly on his mother's side. What really sets this book apart, however, is Oz's personality itself. You have to love and admire this man - and enjoy his sense of humor.
"A Tale of Love and Darkness" could have benefited from better editing. I would advise the reader to keep in mind that Oz was born in 1939, for the book can be imprecise about dating events, and some readers might wish to begin by looking at the family picture on p.509.

This book is intelligent, witty, heartfelt, appealing, and troubling. The author touches on many simple things of everyday life that make his life story unique and have affected his writing. With his superb prose, he puts readers in his own situation thereby giving a sense of what it must have felt like to live the life of Amos Oz. There are precious reminiscences, my favorite being his parents and himself on the one phone line from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv simply giving a weekly hello to relatives. He relates his deep shame at having inadvertently harmed a young Arab boy, what it was like to celebrate the night of Israel's Independence, his experience of being ushered out of an auditorium after laughing at Menachem Begin's use of the word "to arm", how in awe he felt in the presence of David Ben Gurion, how he became aware of his own political leanings, and the difficulty of carving out his own place in kibbutz life. He also opened his soul in revealing the anguish of his mother's illness and the pain of her death.

I love Oz's writing. It's very passionate, but often in an understated way. This is a truly special book. Enjoy it.

A Tale of Love and Darkness is a hilarious though serious book about the life of the author in the historical setting of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Being the great storyteller he is, Amos Oz made the true events so easy to relate to, and as such this book is remarkable.By also reading Disciples of Fortune, Survival in Auschwitz, The Union Moujik,one gets a deeper understanding of the subject of Oz's writing.

As I wrote yesterday, but deleted because I don't use my real name, this book is everything the news and customers have posted. I will only add this WARNING. Those of you, who, like myself, read about this book as the story of his mother's suicide, have been given a slanted idea about " A Tale of Love and Darkness." Yes, his mother's suicide is here, but far more than that.

As others have said better than I: It's a history of Palestine (pre-Israel), the autobiography of a writer, the way that European Jews experienced lower class/lower middle class life Palestine in the late 30's, early 40's, and all the myriad influences and people that created the great Amos Oz, who is surprisingly modest throughout. REALLY modest.

Yes, as others have said, Oz is my favorite author. BUT, no one should imagine that this will be an easy read, because it is not. It isn't written to excite;is not plot-driven but meditative and far-ranging, as well as non-linear. It differs from Oz' other work, both novels and non-fiction, in that way. It is a long march and the reader must do some hard work to keep up with chronology and mostly to keep one's interest going.

Do not buy this because of a few sensationalist views. Buy this, and yes, I too believe it is a MASTERPIECE, truly AMAZING-- if you are interested in: writing, Israel, Kibbutz life, in exile and hope, in situational despair, in character portraits, and in Oz himself.

His mother's death IS utterly wrenching but hardly the main story and his father comes to life through Oz' genius, as well as his unhappy O how unhappy mom. Also, beware that because he meanders hither and yon, when her death happens it hurts, man o does it! During the second section and esp on the last pages I was sobbing, as her life's end is overwhelmingly sad. But whoever I first read claiming this is the story of his mother, I believe was wrong. It is a HUGE travel and the reader needs energy to keep going, to keep interested until at some point, one is simply hooked.

I recommend this book highly but for experienced readers only, not looking for a quick fix, nor a page turner. For those who want a panoramtic and highly detailed tale, yes buy this and work it. I'm so glad Amos Oz dared to write a book so different from his other ones as he is a private man, a great one, and he got so much right here. Dig in and don't expect to love it all, not at the beginning. I remember almost every vignette now but it took three tries to get 'in'.

True to its title, this is a no holds barred personal masterpiece. Perhaps, this is the book that one should read before any of his other works because you can see so much of his fiction coming from his personal life.

As a long time fan of Amos Oz, I was not prepared for this extremely personal non linier biography of his early life. While jumping from his granparents to his parents history to the present time, he manages to weave a lucid memory of his childhood, the relationship of his parents, grandparents, and the amount of secrecy that many of us, contemporaries of his, though not Israelis were raised to not question.

Mr. Oz, on the other hand has discarded the family covertness of that time. Learning so much about his life, I will have to become a re-reader of some of his novels and will look at the ones I have not read with new enlightenment.

This is the first Amos Oz book I have read so I have nothing to compare it to. I loved it. A great storyteller even about true events.

As I read this book, I alternated between laughing out loud and weeping uncontrollably - not only for Amos Oz's private tragedy, but also for the larger tragedy of our joint history. This book provides an intimate personal description of some of the most dramatic periods in the history of Israel and Jerusalem. The writing is remarkable. I wish I could have read it in the original Hebrew, but de Langes translation is great.

Since 1973 when I read My Michael, I have read many of the novels Oz has written since. He has become a favorite writer. His voice, his perspective, his gentleness shine through in his work.

However, A Tale of Love and Darkness is absolutely stellar in every way. It is historically fascinating and emotionally powerful -- especially the end.

Whoever gives awards to books this year, should surely give this book the top prize.

Oz calls himself a 'word child' from the earliest of times. His love of language and his ability to use it in such lyrical and striking terms, is what sets Oz apart from many good writers today. A Tale of Love and Darkness is a magical book, one which recount's Oz's story from the eyes of a child growing up in Palestine, when was a young child of 8 or 9 years old. Oz moves backwards and forwards telling his story, which appears to be non-fiction, (about his own life and that of Israel,)but could very well have elements of a beautiful fairy tale and fiction as he discusses what life was like growing up in Palestine and then Israel of from the late 1940s. In his early life, he dealt with the suicide of his mother, and its impact on his relationship with his father, himself and his country.

My only regret is that I could not read this amazing book in its original language of Hebrew. Being a lover of words myself, there are probably even deeper and more mystical layers of meaning in the original language of this great writer.

A number of long- time readers of Amos Oz have said that this is by far his greatest work and a true masterpiece.
They say his evocation of the Jerusalem world of the thirties and forties is unmatched. That his description of his problematic and tremendously interesting intellectually overcharged family is done with dignity and distance which is nonetheless heartwarming.
They say that Oz born to the right and having lived his political life largely as champion of the left provides a balanced picture of the fundamental political argument which has divided the Israeli public for years.
They say that this story of a family is also one of the most convincing evocations of the early years of Israel .
They speak of it as a gripping, moving read from start to finish.





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The child of Ashkenazi Jews who escaped to Jerusalem just before the outbreak of World War II, Amos Klausner (the author's original name) grew up in a scholarly family which encouraged his precocity. His great uncle Joseph was Chair of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and wrote his magnum opus about Jesus of Nazareth. His father read sixteen or seventeen languages, wrote poetry, and had an enormous library, while his mother spoke four or five languages, could read seven or eight, and told elaborate stories.

Amos grew up a solitary child, encouraged to entertain himself while his parents worked. Always a writer at heart, he believed that "it was not enough for me to be intelligent, rational, good, sensitive, creative." He often felt he was a "one-child show...a non-stop performance," always on display to the relatives, his accomplishments never seeming to be enough.

In this elaborate, non-linear autobiography, Oz and his family are seen as archetypal immigrants to Jerusalem, people who arrived when the land was still under British rule and who helped create a new homeland, arguing ferociously about the direction the country should take and the leaders who should lead it. The history of Jerusalem combines with the author's own genealogical records and his memories about his early family life to create a broad picture of the society in which he grew up and in which his writing talent took root.

Detailed, highly descriptive, and filled with introspection about his unusual life, the book shows the tensions within the society and within his family. After his mother's suicide when he was twelve, he broke with his father, joined a kibbutz, and, at fifteen changed his name. His observations about himself in relation to his peers and in relation to the outside world, even at that young age, show his inner turmoil and determination to discover a personal identity.

As the book moves back and forth in time, the author comments about his writing, the people who influenced him, and his "pickpocketing," his "stealing" of the lives of real people in order to invent stories about them. His observations about Israel, its leaders, its never-ending wars with the Arabs, and his experience as a resident of a kibbutz for more than thirty years broaden the scope and provide insight into one man's life in this developing country. Obviously a huge achievement for Oz personally, this is also a huge contribution to the understanding of the growth of a Jewish homeland and to an understanding of how Oz became the writer he is. Much more detailed and leisurely than Oz's novels, this is slow but satisfying reading for those who admire his novels. Mary Whipple