A Tale of Love and Darkness |  | Author: Amos Oz
Creator: Nicholas de Lange
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 17695
Media: Paperback
Pages: 560
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 015603252X
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780156032520
ASIN: 015603252X
Publication Date: November 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this bestselling and critically acclaimed new work by "one of Israel's most gifted and prolific authors" (Helen Epstein, The Forward) is at once a family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide when he was twelve years old. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and its community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation.
(20051227)
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 36
 All Oz all the time April 4, 2010
RUHU (St. Louis, MO)
A brilliantly written autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness is sometimes gorgeously descriptive, witty, with beautifully rounded and developed characters. At times, however, it's a hard slog.
It's amazing how Oz somehow managed to know and interact with so many of the fathers and mothers of the State of Israel. The history alone makes this a powerful read.
 A story of sorrow told in beautiful, joyous prose November 23, 2009
Arul V. Suresh (SAINT LOUIS, MO United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
There are 54 reviewers who recorded their thoughts before mine. So, my review includes some comments on those reviews.
I found the book to be very fascinating because I am very curious about Jews as people and Israel as a country. Amos Oz has gone through events that few people go through in their life ... the most difficult one is his mother's suicide. The story is told in a radiating style with his mother's suicide being the focus. Events either flow towards it or away from it. It is not easy to tell such a difficult, painful story. Amos Oz tells it very effectively and virtually takes you into his life. His prose is so beautiful. He is also very humorous.
As many commented, this book is not completely autobiographical. A bulk of it is on his childhood years. He was in kibbutz for nearly 35 years starting from when he was nearly 15, but less than one third of the book is devoted to it. While so much detail is shared with readers about his reading habits, the people influenced him, etc., the life-changing decision he made with respect to joining kibbutz is told as if he woke up one day and decided to do it. There is no detail on how he found out about it, what he thought about it initially, and how he ultimately came up with the conviction.
Someone has mentioned that there are nothing but street names in the first 70 pages and the book was so boring they could not continue. I feel sorry for the person because he missed the best parts of the book. Even in the first 70 pages, there are a number of events of interest. In fact the most poetical paragraph in the book is in the first 70 pages which describes how his mother acted in the presence of a famous writer (Agnon).
 Long-Winded But Enjoyable March 15, 2009
Sharvul (Israel)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
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.
Memoirs are made of this September 15, 2008
D. Straton (Australia)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This review was published in The Australian, August 16, 2008. Greg Sheridan is the Foreign Editor.
[...]
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.
The Eternal Jewish Mother July 8, 2008
Eric Maroney (Brooktondale, NY)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 36
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