The Reflection: Oz and Israel
A Tale
of Love and Darkness is more than a memoir; it is a compilation of
memories of history in the making, of politics, the community, the family and
home environments. There are two voices in the memoir: the distinct memories perceived
by the young eyes of the child Amos, and the reflections of him as an adult,
mature enough to understand and interpret the experiences that influenced his
life. In A Tale of Love and Darkness
by Amos Oz, his family is used as a reflection of Israel and Jews throughout
the ages showing the eclectic influences through its development as a country
and on the inhabitants.
The diverse cultural, academic
and political ideologies that have accompanied the Jews to Jerusalem is observed
by Oz as their knowledge is fused together and helps create a new type of
irremovable inheritance. Although Oz begins describing his own life by
comparing his family’s relationship with books to that of a lover, he also
depicts how in Jerusalem, at the heart of their land, everyone else seems to be
having an affair with books as well. Jerusalem, at the time under British rule,
since the 1920s, is now surrounded by well-educated and cultured Jews who have
now returned to their land from across Europe to make Aliyah (16-17). To young
Oz, it seems everyone he encounters is a scholar (3). In the memoir, the
intellectual Jews in Jerusalem are married to books with knowledge as their
first-born child. Oz describes his own relatives outside his nuclear family,
whom amongst can be found more book lovers, one behind another, some, more
notable than others like his Uncle Joseph Klausner, a notable historian,
writer, i.a. . Oz remarks how the land’s present state of British occupation
greatly influenced their extensive reading habits. “What else did we have to
do” (21)? He remarks how Jerusalem’s 7 o’clock curfew was enforced by the
British (21). Britain treated them like
a strict father, keeping them under strict
regulations like children who needed to be sent to bed early. Despite
the locals’ limitations, Jewish people found freedom through reading as a form
of entertainment and escape.
Within his nuclear family, Oz
is fed a balanced diet of intellectual literature[1] by his
father and what his father deemed as fluff [2], by his
mother. His father, Yehuda Arieh Klausner, an intellectual deriving from a long
line of scholars, passes on his Lithuanian and Odessan roots to Oz, constantly
feeding him intellectual meat. Meanwhile,
his mother Fania Mussman, an educated woman from an affluent family in Rovno,
Poland, concedes him with literary desserts. Both parents shared idealistic
expectations of the New Jew prior to their arrival to British-occupied
Palestine (37, 193). As mentioned in the course, the New Jew is an idea comprised of a modern Jews who is not only
intellectual, but strong, as well as attractive. Despite the fact that Oz’s
father could read approximately 16 languages and speak eleven, while his mother
could read and write half as many, he was only taught Hebrew (2). Their vision
for an Israeli state fomented Zionistic ideals in Oz’s own life. Throughout his
childhood, Oz could sense the burden of his parents’ hopes of his achieving the
greatness which had passed them by (267). Even during his teenage years when Oz
physically rebels against his family legacy, Arieh’s faith in his son does not
flicker as he still hopes that the family torch will be passed on to his son
(464, 477). Despite his youthful efforts to purge himself from his family ties,
Oz has demonstrated how not even such a drastic change of environment and
lifestyle was capable of stifling the flames cultivated by so many generations
past (487, 515). Oz articulates, “in
vain did I endeavor to excel in farm work and fail in school. In vain did I
grill myself like a steak in my efforts to be as brown as the rest of them”
(515). In vain, in vain, in vain he goes on to describe how he tried to
eradicate his identity, yet expresses that beneath the layers of his deep brown
tan, there still persisted a pale versifier at his core.
Because the memoir is saturated
with the heterogeneous origins of how and why the Jews share certain values, Oz
shares two perspectives of how this love for books developed. This takes place
before British occupation and before many Jews were uprooted or compelled to
leave their European homes. Outsiders defined education as the Jew’s real
religion, while Jews understood the value of it, believing “that education was
an investment in the future, the only thing no one can ever take away from your
children” (178). Without any understanding of Jewish history and the incessant
prejudice that accompanies it, it is easy for an outsider not to comprehend
this bond with knowledge that has developed over centuries. As shown in the
scriptures, “wisdom, like an inheritance, is a good thing and benefits those
who see the sun (Ecc. 7.11 NIV). In his memoir, Jews might not have been
expelled from Europe with physical riches like their ancestors did in the Torah
during their expulsion from Egypt, however, in this new age, they have returned
with intellectual riches. The knowledge that derives from education has become
woven into the identity of Jewish culture as their irremovable inheritance.
The eclectic experiences that
Jews have had forms the personification and value on books, comparing them to a
child or a woman. Oz shows his readers that not only is the body of the book
appealing, but most importantly, it is the contents that initiates such a bond
between the two. It is the wisdom found between the pages that hold the secrets
that have saved many Jews around the world. Throughout the memoir, Oz
personifies the book when describing his father’s own “sensual relationship
with his books” always stroking them like a woman and even comparing his first
published book to a child when he says, “it’s as though I’ve just had another
baby.” (23, 132). Despite these references to these comparisons within his own
time, Oz also shows his reader that this is far from being a new concept. The
urge to seek wisdom has been taught since the writing of the Tanakh, “fortunate
is the man who has found wisdom…. It is a tree of life for those
who grasp it, and those who draw near it are fortunate” (Tanakh Online, Mishlei.
3:13, 18). It is also characterized as a woman when it says, “do not forsake
her [i.e. wisdom], and she will preserve you; love her and she will guard you
(Tanakh Online, Mishlei. 4:6) Constantly, it assures people who seek wisdom
that they will find protection in the truth found in the words within that
book. The same ideology has been passed down so that even Oz’s family
acknowledges and embraces these benefits which wisdom or knowledge offer
through books and education as a medium. He says, “even through “another war,
another revolution, another migration, more discriminatory laws—your diploma
you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run
away to wherever Jews are allowed to live” (178). He explains how the wisdom contained
in books has been the preservation of his people many times. It is the tool
that has provided them with the education, like a mother who nurtures her
children and feeds them with the nourishment they need to survive.
The effects of the influence of
British dominion and of the World War that caused another genocide are mirrored
in the people that influence Oz’s life. Britain’s pre-World-War II motto of,
“Keep calm and Carry On” resounds amongst Oz’s family circle. That stereotype
of sterile British coldness, creeps up in the background, its effects,
revealing its presence in the memoir from time to time. In a phone call to
relatives in Tel Aviv, Oz reflects on the awkwardness of his family’s
conversation, describing its’ staccato tone (11). At the time, Oz was too young
to absorb the gravity of the political tension caused by Hitler, their
domineering father—the British, and their Arab neighbors, but, as a writer, he
reflects on the uncertainty of the times they were living. Looking back, Oz has
been able to read between those awkward lines and says the following:
those
telephone conversations reveal to me now how hard it was for them—for everyone,
not just my parents—to express private feelings. They had no difficulty at all
expressing communal feelings—they were emotional people, and they knew how to
talk. Oh, how they loved to talk! .…but the moment they tried to give voice to
a private feeling, what came out was something tense, dry, even frightened, the
result of generation upon generation of repression and negation. (12)
Within his memoir, he mirrors the impact of
British colonialism in Palestine. There is trepidation, the people live
as if on their tip-toes on a land that they cannot officially call their own.
He mentions repression, a reminder of the British influence on the people,
advising its’ subjects to reign in their emotions, until all that is left is an
unrecognizable and numb exterior. Negation displays the absence and perhaps
even the denial of the positive display of emotions such as love and affection.
These become a significant and absent variable in Oz’s own childhood as well.
The
word, love, in the title of the memoir is a paradox, because even though
it is what Oz most craves, he describes more the lack of physical affection
actually received as a child. His parents’ way of showing love differs from
other families and even Fania warns Oz not to look at her marriage with his
father as a pattern for his own in the future (505). Oz hardly describes any
form of physical affection between his parents or between them and him. His
relationship with his parents always seems to live off on conversations. Their
function always seems to lead for the purpose the education. His father’s
conversations with him are typical of other group conversations occurring amongst
the Jews. Somehow, they always finish in a monologist lecture (66). As a
consequence, the lack of affection and communication affects Oz’s development
in his childhood.
He
learns from a very young age that showing intellectual prowess and a mature
perspective of thought allows him to gain his parents’ and other adults’
attention through the manner of smiles, looks, and proud remarks. With his
parents, their attention, verbal praise, and pride in his academic success, and
mental development takes new meaning. It has replaced the meaning of the
expression of physical affection in Oz’s life and he understands it, accepts
and craves it. He is often described as a special or extraordinary child and he
takes pride in his oddity, or his uniqueness as a child (261, 214, 217). “Even
when I was five,” Oz says, “I was ashamed of crying, and at the age of eight or
nine I learned to suppress it so as to be admitted into the ranks of men”
(457). It seems that Oz has renounces his childhood in order to receive his
parents’ favor. Being an only and lonely
child, Oz does what he feels he must to be accepted. In return, he is treated
like a little adult and he purposely tries to appease them or seek ways to
impress them, to assimilate himself into their adult circle. He becomes
addicted to their affection and becomes a “one-child show. A nonstop
performance. A lonely stage star, constantly compelled to improvise, and to
fascinate, excite, amaze, and entertain his public”. Because it worked so well,
young Oz feels he has “to steal the show from morning to evening” (261). Oz’s
actions show how he has learned to use his intellect in order to secure his
parents’ attention and affection. His mother’s early death seems to exacerbate
the conflict of his emotions of feeling unworthy and impossible to be loved
(213-214). After her death, he feels his attempts to draw his parent’s
attention (i.e. affection) with his talents have been a waste, and that the
affection they did have was still insufficient to retain his mother in the land
of the living.
Oz’s
own performance as a child and his need to appease the adults surrounding him
reflect the actions of the Jewish population and even modern day Israel. Before
the instatement of the Israeli state, Oz has described the need for his people
to put on a show for their own survival since the Jewish Enlightenment, “there
was a terror that we might, heaven forbid, make a bad impression on the
Gentiles, and then they would be angry and do things to us too dreadful to think
about” (190). Despite all the efforts made to play by society’s rules, to use
their talents, their knowledge, their strengths, denying themselves for the
good of others, it could all be undone with just one mistake (104). “In short,”
Oz explains, “we had to try very hard to make a good impression that no child
must mar, because even a single child…could damage the reputation of the entire
Jewish people” (190). Bearing such a heavy weight by attempting to integrate
themselves to the Gentile world, in peaceful and mutual symbiosis, Oz depicts
this fragile relationship as a frantic courtship (104). Even
during his childhood, he shows how their future has always appeared to be
hanging by a thread, in suspense (11). This continual performance that Oz
writes about is an effort “to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be
accepted, to belong, to be loved. . .” (104) The feelings that young Oz felt,
the need to put on a show, to impress, is not a foreign feeling, but actually a
mutual understanding by fellow Jews for generations.
The
show continues for Jewish politicians today since the establishment of the
Israeli state. They find themselves with the task of trying to represent their
country in a positive light on a global scale. The frantic courtship which Jews experienced for centuries continues
even in modern day as the media at large fails to represent the country on
equal footing. Marvin Byers, an American and Israeli writer shared his own
experience of this in his book Yasser
Arafat—An Apocalyptic Character? (1997). While living in Israel, Byers
realized just how little the media outside of Israel actually covers. He says, “the news media never seems to
hesitate in promulgating twisted ‘facts’” (47). By the time the West news media
focuses their cameras on Israel, the media will usually capture its’ actions of
defense in poor light (46-8) Israel continues trying to appease its’ global
neighbors as Oz has described by doing “everything humanly possible to please
it, to break through its hostility with frantic courtship” (104). Today, the
fight for appeasement among the Jewish community continues around the world by
using their intellectual inheritance through their contribution through arts
and information, cyber technology, medical, and agricultural fields.
Although Fania’s death during
Oz’s childhood stirs many emotions of anger, guilt, and deep hurt, he initially
interprets it as a failure on his part for his poor performance to gain her
affection. Fania’s overdose suicide made her son feel abandoned. “To forsake is
to betray”, Oz explains, “And she had forsaken both of us, Father and me”
(213). He considered it as a sign that she had never loved him because Oz did
not think of her as a denatured mother. This leads young Oz to believe he
couldn’t be loved or even be deserving of it (213). Just as he considers his
mother has turned her back on him, his action of leaving Jerusalem for the
Hulda kibbutz is an answer to her abandonment. His resolution of moving to the
kibbutz reveals his tactic to cope with his mother´s loss as if to say, ‘as you
have forsaken me, so shall I forsake you’. However, this attempt of Oz is
futile because his memoir reveals how he subconsciously tries to meet his
mother’s approval by emulating her ideal image of the New Jew.
As Oz emulates the image of the
New Jew, he also attempts to turn his
back on his father’s family legacy of intellectualism because of Arieh’s own
betrayal to his marriage and family. Arieh’s unfaithfulness to his wife during
her depression injures Oz to reject any demonstration of his inheritance. Oz
discovers his father with another woman at a café by accident while cutting
class. He remembers seeing his father delighting another woman while his own
mother was sitting at home, shrouded in darkness, forgotten. It didn’t help
that his father remarried approximately a year after his wife’s death,
whereupon Oz’ down spiral in his academics begins (465-66). “I killed my
father” Oz says, “particularly by changing my name” (464). He forsook his
father by his act of moving to Hulda to work as a pioneer, while trying to show
depreciation for what his family held in high honor—education. Even though he
flees from it, this passion for knowledge runs through his veins no matter
where he escapes away to. Even though he initially refrains from participating
in discussions, writing or telling stories, he cannot refrain from reading and
through this method, Oz continues his autodidactic education (483). Eventually
he is even caught cultivating his artistic abilities through painting or
writing (515).
His father’s betrayal to both
his mother and him is a reflection of British occupation and their betrayal to
both Arabs and Jews. Oz describes the relationship between the Jews and Arabs
as brothers bound together by the same father who has betrayed them both like
Arieh (342). Like Fania and her sisters whose worse accusation among them was
sounding like their domineering mother, the same way Oz describes the loathing between
Arabs and Jews who see their father’s (colonialism) reflection in each other
(172, 343). He explains how they are seen as the new colonizers by Arabs who
have drawn the short stick in this bargain. Like Oz, Jews have also rejected
their father, yet in spite of this, Arabs have observed how they have nevertheless
begun emulated them as well (435-36).
Oz’s encounters and perspectives
of his Arab neighbors changes over time throughout his memoir. His initial
encounter with Arabs was with an elderly man who saved him from a locked
storage room in a shop during his early childhood. Feeling this new comfort, Oz
remembers being reluctant to leave his embrace and gentle caresses as the Arab
man stroked his cheek and patted his shoulders (231). By the time he encounters
Aisha, an Arab girl, Oz has been well indoctrinated in Zionism, so much that he
cannot simply be a child. He already feels the heavy weight of being an
ambassador “with a strong sense of national awareness” on a mission to bring
this girl to the Jewish Zionistic ways of reasoning before he makes an attempt
to befriend her (322-25). Aisha confounds him though when she breaks that
invisible barrier between them by coaxing the childish nature that has been
deeply buried within Oz by challenging him to climb a tree (326). By the next
time that Oz considers the relationship between Jews and Arabs, he has
witnessed too much violence swiftly after the establishment of the Israeli
State in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli War. He has become desensitized by the
war and indifferent to Arabs and their cause until his perspective shifts again
during his time at the kibbutz (321). For years Oz has lived with a sense of
his self-righteous existence in Palestine, experienced the fear and the
animosity towards the people who have threatened his very existence, and those
he has loved.
Ephraim Avneri, a kibbutz member seems to put
the issue between Jews and Arabs into context for Oz in a new perspective.
Ephraim’s balanced outlook reverberates through Oz even in his most recent
years. “What do you expect from them?” he asked Oz, “to celebrate with us and
wish us luck?... And what about what we’ve taken from them?... If we take more
from them someday, now that we already have something, that will be a very big
sin” (435-36). This is also warning which foreshadows the present condition
between Israelis and Palestinians’ land dispute. In an interview with Amos Oz
where he discussed his novel Judas (2014),
he repeats similar ideas that were formed that day after listening to Ephraim,
“we won’t shoot them because they’re a nation of murderers, but for the simple
reason that we also have the right to live and for the reason that we also have
a right to a land of our own,” in answer to being provoked (Oz 436). Oz
realized that day that he has a choice to develop his own opinion separate from
the pharisaical Zionists that he didn’t know he had before.
Oz’s
mother Fania, who slips away from his world without anyone’s notice or sympathy,
was neglected due to insufficient knowledge or interest of her condition. Despite
her intellectual capabilities, Fania’s life appears to suppress her talents by
her silence during discussions, writing during the day when her husband is out,
and simply remaining a housewife who foments and supports her husband’s
endeavors instead (68, 365, 404). Even
with all this, she seems at peace until the ghosts of her past seem to haunt
her and the depression sets in. Oz documents her two bouts of depression from
which she couldn’t be revived from in the end.
Along with other women of her generation, Fania’s ticket to Palestine
sent her through an acculturation shock from which there was no return (214).
Other factors that could have affected his mother’s suicide were the loss of
the people whom she had grown up with during the Nazi extermination of Jews in
Rovno between 1941-42 (152). In the end, the motives that led to her suicide
are ambiguous, but the severity of her decline goes by unnoticed by many,
unconsidered by family, and misunderstood by doctors (212, 448). Some blamed her, making her the one
responsible for allowing herself to wallow in depression without considering
the facts. She was a victim of her time because the gravity of depression as a
mental condition was not yet understood during Fania’s lifetime. As a result,
there were not enough people who could have taken an interest and made a
difference. The same mentality with which Fania was regarded during her
death-inducing depression serves as a reflection for the condition of many
holocaust survivors in Palestine.
Like
Fania, the feelings towards the Jewish holocaust survivors who had immigrated
to Palestine lacked understanding and sympathy. Jews already living in
Palestine or who had fled Europe before Hitler’s regime could touch them, were
unsympathetic to those who did not meet the same fate as them. They were
measured unfairly by Jews already living in Palestine and regarded on the
lowest rung of their social hierarchy. They were seen as a blight on their
reputation, not only contaminating the Hebrew language with their mixture of
Yiddish, but also tearing down what their Jewish predecessors had struggled to
recreate in the image of the New Jew:
someone strong, not a victim, optimistic, not embittered (13-14). Like Oz who was embarrassed of his mother’s weak mental
condition, so were many other Jews of these holocaust survivors. These scarred
survivors were unwanted by both Europe and even among their own because their
experiences had converted their lives into an empty shell, leaving many scarred
and thought of as unproductive. These holocaust survivors like Oz’s neighbor,
Mr. Licht whom he described as yelling at the children who passed by, had great
need of “a huge amount of patience and effort” which their Jewish comrades were
lacking (13-14) The book describes everyone in Jerusalem with their thoughts in
a second-dimensional world that existed in their writings, thoughts, or
research (36). There was no time to think about anyone else even for hurt
people like Mr. Licht and Fania.
Amos
Oz depicts his family and their eclectic roots as a reflection of Israel and
the people inhabiting this land. The memoir establishes the context of Jews’
value for wisdom, books, and explains the bond between the two. The text
becomes an educational tool that depicts the effects of British dominion and the
surrounding political issues in Oz’s life and other Jews in Palestine. In A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz redefines
the word love and establishes the need to impress as as child does and uses this as a
reflection of Israel and Jews’ situation throughout history. His mother’s death a thread that runs through the entire book, mirrors the experience of
Jewish holocaust survivors and their treatment in Palestine while his parents’ betrayal
eventually leads Oz to change his identity and his perspectives on the Arab community.
