OZ, Amos

PUBLICATION

Novels

Makom aher. 1966; as Elsewhere, Perhaps, 1973.

Mikha'el sheli. 1968; as My Michael, 1972.

'Ad mavet (two novellas). 1971; as Unto Death, 1975.

La-ga'at ba-mayim, la-ga'at ba-ruah. 1973; as Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, 1974.

Har ha-'etsah ha-ra'ah: Sheloshah sipurim (three novellas). 1976; as The Hill of Evil Counsel, 1978.

Menuhah nekhonah. 1982; as A Perfect Peace, 1985.

Kufsah shehorah. 1986; as Black Box, 1988.

La-da'at Ishah. 1989; as To Know a Woman, 1991.

Ha-matsav ha-shelishi [The Third Condition]. 1991; as Fima, 1993.

Al tagidi lailah. 1994; as Don't Call It Night, 1995.

Panter ba-martef. 1995; as Panther in the Basement, 1997.

Oto ha-yam. 1999; as The Same Sea, 2001.

Short Stories

Anashim aherim: Mivhar [Different People]. 1974.

Artsot ha-tan: Sipurim. 1965; as Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories, 1981.

Other

Soumchi (for children). 1978; translated as Soumchi, 1980.

Be-or ha-tekhelet ha-'azah: ma'amarim u-reshimot. 1979; as Under This Blazing Light: Essays, 1995.

Poh va-sham be-Erets-Yisra'el bi-setav 1982 (essays). 1983; as In the Land of Israel, 1983.

Mi-mordot ha-Levanon: ma'amarim u-reshimot (essays). 1987; as The Slopes of Lebanon, 1989.

Shetikat ha-shamayim: 'Agnon mishtomem 'al Elohim (literary criticism). 1993; as The Silence of Heaven: Agnon's Fear of God, 2000.

Israel, Palestine, and Peace: Essays. 1994.

Mathilim sipur. 1996; as The Story Begins: Essays on Literature, 1999.

Kol ha-tikvot: Mahashavot 'al zehut Yisra'elit [All Our Hopes] (essays). 1998.

Editor, with Richard Flantz, and author of introduction, Until Daybreak: Stories from the Kibbutz. 1984.

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Film Adaptations:

Michael Sheli, 1975 (as My Michael, 1975), from the novel Mikha'el Sheli; Kufsah shehorah (Black Box), 1994.

Bibliography:

'Amos 'Oz—bibliyografyah, 1953-1981: 'Im mivhar hashlamot 'ad kayits 1983 by Joseph Jerushalmi, 1984; 'Amos 'Oz—bibliyografyah: La-shanim 1984-1996 by Ruti Kalman, 1998.

Critical Studies:

"The Jackal and the Other Place: The Stories of Oz" by Leon I. Yudkin, in Journal of Semitic Studies (England), 23, 1978, pp. 330-42; "On Oz: Under the Blazing Light" by Dov Vardi, in Modern Hebrew Literature (Israel), 5(4), 1979, pp. 37-40; "The Beast Within: Women in Amos Oz's Early Fiction," in Modern Judaism, 4(3), October 1984, pp. 311-21, and Israeli Mythogynies: Women in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction, 1987, both by Esther Fuchs; "Amos Oz in Arad: A Profile" by Shuli Barzilai, in Southern Humanities Review, 21(1), Winter 1987; Voices of Israel, Essays on and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Applefeld, and Amos Oz by Joseph Cohen, 1990; "Language and Reality in the Prose of Amos Oz," in Modern Language Studies, 20(2), Spring 1990, pp. 79-97, and Between God and Beast: An Examination of Amos Oz's Prose, 1993, both by Avraham Balaban; "Portrait: Amos Oz, Israel's Willful Conscience," in U.S. News & World Report, 110 (14), 15 April 1991; "Amos Oz" by Eleanor Wachtel, in Queen's Quarterly (Canada), 98(2), Summer 1991; The Tensions between Zionism's Messianism and Liberal Humanitarianism in the Works of Amos Oz (dissertation) by Emily Dembitz Katz, Hampshire College, 1992; "Amos Oz and Izhak Ben Ner: The Image of Woman in Literary Works, and as Transvalued in Film Adaptations" by Nurith Gertz, in Israeli Writers Consider the "Outsider," edited by Leon I. Yudkin, 1993; "The Epistolary Politics of Amos Oz's Black Box " by Joshua M. Getz and Thomas O. Beebee, in Prooftexts, 18(1), January 1998, pp. 45-65; Amos Oz Writing the Israeli Paradox by Rebecca Steffens and others, 2000.

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One of Israel's most popular writers and a major figure in contemporary Hebrew culture, Amos Oz is a member of what is often referred to as the state generation of writers (Dor Hamedinah ). This is the second generation of native-born Israeli writers (A.B. Yehoshua is another), who began to write and publish in the late 1950s and the early 1960s and who continue to dominate Israeli literature. In many ways Oz typifies the transition from mid-twentieth century to contemporary Hebrew writing. Born in Jerusalem in 1939 and a member of the kibbutz Hulda from 1954, Oz grew up against the backdrop of the early ideals of the Jewish yishuv (settlement) in Palestine and the nascent post-1948 state. Informing both the public consciousness and the literature was the figure of the new Hebrew in his new/ancient homeland. Indeed, the literature was intended not only to reflect this new reality but also to help create it. Therefore, Hebrew writing from the early decades of the twentieth century through the late 1950s directly repudiated diasporic (European) Jewish history. It laid to rest the old Jewish victim and replaced him with the independent warrior-farmer who worked the land, battled its enemies, and built the new Jewish nation. This nation, it was expected, would realize the aspirations for a communal, national existence for Jews without reverting to outmoded traditions of religious belief and worship. The gender bias of the pronoun "him" in the above description is intended. This was a fiction written primarily by men, and it concerned itself largely with heroic males involved in traditional areas of male endeavor in a world defined by public rather than by private action. Oz's name, meaning "potency" or "vigor," is itself a reflection of these tendencies within the prestate and early state period. Oz replaced his father's diasporic name, Klausner, marking the son's shift into Israeli/Hebrew heroism.

Born before the war of independence, Oz, like others of his generation, imbibed these national goals as expressed in the press, in the ideology of the youth movement, and in the budding literature. Coming to his maturity after the establishment of the state of Israel, however, Oz did not experience nationhood as an event still to be achieved, as sufficiently precarious so as to require constant protection by its defenders and constructors. Furthermore, he lived through the series of both dramatic and mundane events that marked the transformation from yishuv to statehood. This included the influx of Jewish refugees and survivors from decimated Europe, who represented just that population of old Jews that the state of Israel had imagined itself as replacing. It was the Adolf Eichmann trial in the early 1960s that put the Holocaust center stage in the national consciousness and made it available as a subject for Israeli fiction, a fact that was reinforced, albeit also transformed, by the Six-Day War. This war had seemed to many a second Auschwitz in the making. That Israel achieved a stunning victory defused some of the shame attached to the Diaspora. It also inaugurated the new reality of a politically and territorially powerful Jewish state, presumably even less in need of being defended by its contemporary population and perhaps requiring just the opposite of the old heroic stance, the recovery of some of the traditional European principles of Jewish humanism and humility.

Like other writers of his generation, Oz simultaneously participated in the national myths of the first half of the twentieth century and stepped back from them as the new reality of Israel asserted itself. In particular he rejected the nationalistic goals of a politically motivated fiction intended to realize an as yet unattained Zionist ideal and began to return Hebrew literature to its nineteenth-century origins in the more fraught and personal experience of individuals caught in the crosscurrents of, on the one hand, national aspirations and events and, on the other, private emotions and desires. These were the issues that had also characterized Hebrew literature (the writings of Joseph Haim Brenner, for example) during the early decades of the prestate yishuv. Thus, the bulk of Oz's writings, including his single Holocaust text, Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, published in Hebrew in 1973 and in an English translation by Nicholas de Lange in 1974, are withdrawals from the didacticism and straightforward social realism of the more popular Israeli fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. Instead, his writings evoke impressionistically, sometimes surrealistically, the inner dynamics of the human mind and heart as his protagonists, often autobiographically informed, strive toward a heroism that can never be realized and that, could it be attained, would likely be barren or, worse, psychologically and ethically oppressive. For as Oz suggests in his more political writings (In the Land of Israel, for example), not only have the internal dynamics of Jewish reality changed since the inception of the state, so, too, have Israel's international relations, including, especially after 1967, its relations with its Palestinian neighbors. The pursuit of peace both as a legacy of the Jews' European past and as a response to its immediately political present is a leitmotif of many of Oz's fictional works, including Touch the Water, Touch the Wind.

—Emily Budick

See the essay on Touch the Water, Touch the Wind.