Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon

Alter (Nabokov and the Real World) examines the life of Israeli author Amos Oz (1939–2018) through the lens of his work in this perceptive biography. Alter unpacks Oz’s childhood by analyzing A Tale of Love and Darkness, a 2002 memoir/novel hybrid in which Oz offers a lightly fictionalized account of growing up in Jerusalem and his mother’s suicide when he was 12. At 14, Oz moved to Kibbutz Hulda, where he met his wife, Nily Zuckerman, and wrote his debut, the kibbutz-set story collection Where the Jackals Howl (1965), the dark tone of which, Alter suggests, reveals how heavily the loss of his mother and growing up in a city ravaged by armed conflict—Oz in 1967 described feeling “haunted” by witnessing at age 9 a man whose belly was “ripped apart” by artillery during the 1948 Palestine War—still weighed on him. Elsewhere, Alter explores Oz’s maturation as a novelist in 1968’s My Michael and his commitment to pluralism in A Journey in the Land of Israel, a 1982 journalistic report for which Oz interviewed Israeli individuals from diverse backgrounds. Alter is forthright about having been friends with Oz, and though his fondness for his subject shows (“His was a life courageously lived”), he largely maintains an evenhanded assessment of Oz’s oeuvre, as when he takes Jackals to task for its “overwrought” prose. The result is a worthy introduction to Oz and his work. (Sept.)