JustASC

I barely blogged during Passover — despite the holiday, we still had to put out newspapers, and we squeezed the work into the few days that weren’t hagim or Shabbat.

I used the forced down time to catch up on Amos Oz. The great Israeli novelist, who turns 70 this year, has a new novella, Rhyming Life and Death, and a collection that brings together excerpts from his fiction and nonfiction, The Amos Oz Reader.

Rhyming Life and Death is a slim but rewarding read: An unnamed “Author” prepares for a literary reading and spins biographies and stories out of the people he meets there and along the way.  It’s a book about how writers create stories, but which plays with readers’ expectations of what it means to read a novel. Is this episode “real,” or is it merely taking place in the “Author’s” head? But since every novel takes place in an author’s head, is the distinction meaningful? (Oz makes these Philip Rothian mindgames go down a lot easier than it sounds.)

And Oz being Oz, there  is no avoiding politics even in his seemingly “nonpolitical” fiction. As he said when accccepting the German Goethe Prize in 2005:

I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred. I believe that books that make us imagine the other may make us more immune to the ploys of the devil, including the inner devil, the Mephisto of the heart.

Imagining the other is not only an aesthetic tool. It is in my view, also a major moral imperative.

“Imagining the other” is also a tool that has allowed Oz, better than most, to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Palestinian perspective, and work toward a moral solution to the conflict.

The full Goethe speech is also in The Amos Oz Reader, where I also found an excerpt from his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness. That led me to find a copy and read the whole thing. It is a riveting memoir, a story about both Oz’s astoundingly literate and polyglot relatives, and about Israel’s founding generation, whose intellectual leaders, like his great uncle Joseph Klausner, step out of the pages of history books into Oz’s own memories. As Oz told the New York Times last week:

Being an Israeli at 70, he noted, is like being an American who is 250 years old. He was there for his country’s birth 61 years ago.

“I saw the Boston Tea Party with my own eyes,” he said with a twinkle. “I personally knew George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”

There’s also an intensely personal and painful story of his own immediate family, although the first half of the book leans more toward a national tale than a personal one. But again, this is Oz: the personal and the political, the familial and historical, are often impossible to tease apart.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 1:42 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.