A Tale of Love and Darkness

I finally finished A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz. Noah asked me what it’s about. Here’s my answer:

It’s a coming-of-age tale about an extraordinary young boy growing up in Israel.
No, that’s not it… It’s a story about the birth of the nation of Israel.
No, that’s not it either… It’s a story about the making of a writer.
No, that’s still not it… It’s a story about mental illness and the effects it has on an entire family.

The problem (if you want to call it that) is that the book is all of these things. These different threads are all woven together into a beautifully written memoir. As I was reading, I kept a card as a bookmark, on which I jotted notes about particularly compelling passages. I thought for this review, I would review some of my notes and share some of the passages that stood out for me:

How’s this for a vivid description of what Amos sees when, rather than put on an extra sweater as he is supposed to do, he turns on the electric heater:

I stared at it and watched the coil begin to glow. It lit up gradually: at first you couldn’t see anything, you just heard a series of crackling sounds, as when you walk on grains of sugar, and after that a pale purplish gleam appeared at either end of the element and a hint of pink began to spread toward the center, like a faint blush on a shy cheek, which turned into a deep blush, which soon ran riot in a shameless display of naked yellow and lecherous lime green, until the glow reached the middle of the coil and glowed unstoppably, a red-hot fire like a savage sun in a shiny metal dish of the reflector that you couldn’t look at without squinting, and the element was now incandescent, dazzling, unable to contain itself…

He often tells stories from his childhood, and his recollection is so clear and precise and remembered from an imaginative child’s perspective, that you can actually feel his loneliness, fear, shame, or whatever emotion he is recounting. Here’s an example: When he was about four years old, his parent used to leave him with a middle-aged neighbor who sometimes would take him shopping and leave him sitting outside the dressing room while she tried on clothing (which she never bought). Once he spies a little girl, “a fairy,” and resolves to pursue her through the store.

Flooded by uncharacteristic bravery, electrified by knightly daring, I plunged fearlessly into the thicket of cloth after her, and swimming against the tide, I fought my way through the mass of rustling garments. And so, finally, panting with excitement, I emerged – almost stumbled – into a sort of poorly lit clearing in the forest…

The “little girl” turns out to be an old woman dressed garishly and made up with “a thick layer of powder mottled with islands of rouge…neither fairy nor wood nymph, but a sardonic-looking, almost elderly woman.” Terrified, Amos runs:

…breathless, terrified, sobbing, I ran, too petrified to shout aloud, I ran, screaming a choked scream inside me, help, help me, I ran crazily among the rustling tunnels in the dark, losing my way, becoming more and more lost in the labyrinth..

Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to parents who had emigrated from Europe in the ‘30s, leaving behind family members who were exterminated by the Nazis. Thus, Amos was a child when the UN General Assembly decided to create two states – one Jewish, one Arab – in Palestine; and he recounts vividly the jubilation in his neighborhood until only hours later the first shots were fired in the War of Independence. Oz tells of these days not from the viewpoint of a historian, but from that of a young child whose world is coming to pieces around him. But he sees the bigger picture as well, in this description of the hundred-year-old conflict between Arabs and Jews.

The Europe that abused, humiliated, and oppressed the Arabs by means of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, and repression is the same Europe that oppressed and persecuted the Jews, and eventually allowed or even helped the Germans to root them out of every corner of the continent and murder almost all of them. But when the Arabs look at us, they see not a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication, and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East – in Zionist guise this time – to exploit, evict, and oppress all over again. And when we look at them, we do not see fellow victims either; we see not brothers in adversity but pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as though our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads, and grown mustaches, but they are still our old murderers, interested only in slitting Jews’ throats for fun.

He also tells amusing stories of his encounters with Menachem Begin and David Ben Gurion. The stories are more personal than political, but reveal much about the confusing political atmosphere in Israel during the 50s and 60s.

From early in his life, Oz seemed destined to be a writer, a calling that was reinforced by the vivid, complex, and sometimes terrifying stories his mother told him, and by various teachers. When he was not yet eight years old, he fell in love with Teacher Zelda.

It was from her I learned that there are some words that need to have total silence around them, to give them enough space, just as when you hang pictures there are some that cannot abide having neighbors.

Later, when Oz was living on a kibbutz, where he went to escape his father and to live a different kind of life from the bookish, word-filled one at home, he found himself yet again drawn to writing and books. A “modest” book by Sherwood Anderson about unremarkable people and incidents made Oz realize that he had, in his own life, the makings of compelling and interesting stories, which he has subsequently transformed into some 20 works of fiction and non-fiction.

So Sherwood Anderson’s stories brought back what I had put behind me when I left Jerusalem, or rather the ground that my feet had trodden all though my childhood and that I had never bothered to bend down and touch. The tawdriness of my parents’ life. The faint smell of flour-and-water paste and pickled herring that always wafted around the Krochmals, the couple who mended broken toys and dolls…I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness…

The stories in A Tale of Love and Darkness circle around each other in both space and time, but always return to the death of his mother by suicide when Amos was 12. Though he introduces his mother’s death early in the book, and we see he and his father trying to cope with her illness throughout the narrative, it is not until the very end that he tells, in detail, how she ended her life. Though both Amos and his father revered her, they never spoke of her after she died. In fact, Oz said that he hardly ever spoke of her, even to his wife or his children, until he wrote this book. And when she died, he was not allowed to go to her funeral. Holding it all inside, he left home at 15, changed his name, and moved to a kibbutz. The rest, as they say, is history.