Amos Oz Short Fiction Analysis
Amos Oz’s short fiction focuses on the Jewish experience, especially in his homeland. It has, collectively, an impressive historical sweep from biblical times to the decades following the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. The main character in “Upon This Evil Earth,” in Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories, is the biblical Jephthah (Judges 11-12); the main characters in “Crusade,” in Unto Death, are the aggressively anti-Semitic members of the medieval retinue of the Count Guillaume of Touron on their way from Europe to the Holy Land in a crusade of the year 1095; the characters in the three interlinked novelettes of The Hill of Evil Counsel are Jerusalem inhabitants concerned about the imminent end of the British mandate and subsequent war of liberation in 1948; finally, “Late Love,” in Unto Death, and the stories in Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories, except “Upon This Evil Earth,” are set on the kibbutz, an Israeli military base, or in the cities of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv in Israel in the decade or two after the 1948 founding of the state. In all of these works, a main concern is the contrast between belonging and not belonging, between being an insider and an outsider, to the land, culture, or society.
Other themes and subjects that pervade Oz’s short and long fiction are, especially as connected to sociopolitical conditions, nostalgia for European culture and ideas in the midst of harsh Middle Eastern realities, the dangers of obsession and extremism, the interrelation between humanity and the natural world, the injuries done to romantic love and marriage by a harsh physical and political environment, the problems of the parent-child relationship, the contrast between one generation and the next, and the power of language and art.
These themes are expressed in articulated form. The short stories—not shorter than twenty pages—and novelettes all have numbered sections as well as subsections indicated by spacing. The only exception is “Longing” (in The Hill of Evil Counsel), which is epistolary: eight letters of Dr. Emanuel Nussbaum to his former sweetheart, Dr. Hermine (“Mina”) Oswald, from September 2 to September 10, 1947. Also distinctive—beyond Oz’s shifts in point of view (particularly in and out of the first-person plural mode), symbolism, figurative language, pervasive personifications, and sentence fragment notation of details—is his frequent biblical allusion. Writing in the very language of the Hebrew Bible, Oz is alert to and makes thematic use of biblical references and overtones in his stories’ titles, characters’ names, imagery, and plot parallels. He even has his own expanded version of a biblical narrative.
Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories
Damage done to marriage and, consequently, the parent-child relationship by the pioneering life in a new, hard land, permeated by threats, is a theme of four of the stories of Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories, as well as “The Hill of Evil Counsel,” “Mr. Levi,” and “Longing” in The Hill of Evil Counsel. In “Where the Jackals Howl,” what appears to be the luring of the beautiful Galila to an attempted lover’s tryst in his kibbutz bachelor’s quarters by the ugly workman Matityahu Damkov, using Galila’s interest in art—painter’s supplies gotten by Damkov from South America—turns out to be the surprising revelation by Damkov to Galila that he is her father. Her father is not her mother’s husband, Sashka, one of the kibbutz intellectuals.
Reader and child are likewise surprised at the end of “Strange Fire” (note the title’s overtones of perversity from Leviticus 10:1). Lily Dannenberg has not, spurred by her Eurocentric unhappiness with...
(This entire section contains 1977 words.)
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Israeli culture, capriciously broken an appointment with the father of her daughter’s fiancé Yosef in order to make a pass at her future son-in-law Yair Yarden. She instead pressures Yair into taking a walk around Jerusalem with her to reveal to him his father’s secret: Yosef had long ago been married for several months to Lily.
The title “Way of the Wind”—with allusions to Genesis and Ecclesiastes—suggests the caprice of the father, Shimshon Sheinbaum, who to be strong, like his similarly unshorn biblical namesake Samson, in his devotion to country and to political writing has abandoned his wife and son Gideon. He lives apart from them on the kibbutz. The allusive title also forecasts Gideon’s tragic attempt to live up to his own heroic biblical namesake to please Shimshon. The result is his becoming fatally tangled in power lines on the kibbutz when his army paratroop unit makes a jump and the wind shifts. Gideon ironically enacts his nickname, “Pinocchio,” by literally hanging from lines. Furthermore, an unpleasant though athletic youngster attempts to rescue him and is surprisingly revealed at the story’s end to be a half brother, one of Shimshon’s rumored but unacknowledged children on the kibbutz.
In “Before His Time,” the unrelenting adversities of the new land—its heat, barrenness, Arab theft or attack—are the background for Dov Sirkin’s desertion of his wife and young children. Poring over maps, a recurrent symbol in Oz’s short fiction, Sirkin lives in Jerusalem, leaving his family behind on the kibbutz. The story’s title refers to Dov’s premature desertion, the death in combat of his estranged military-hero son, and the slaughter of the kibbutz prize stud bull, Samson. Although still healthy, the bull was impotent from the bite of a poisoned jackal. Jackals are recurrent symbols in Oz’s short fiction of the untamed, sometimes savage land, in which a struggle for possession and belonging is continual.
In “The Hill of Evil Counsel” the unhappy, Eurocentric Ruth Kipnis, in contrast to her biblical namesake, deserts her husband and young son, Hillel. She begins an affair, at the ominously named geographical site of the story’s title, with a British officer and second world war hero and leaves Israel with him. Hillel, in contrast to his self-possessed Talmudic namesake, is so upset that he eventually has to be placed on a kibbutz while his father continues to live in Jerusalem.
Another displaced boy is young Uriel (“Uri”) Kolodny, in “Mr. Levi” and “Longing,” who has a series of surrogate parents as he grows up. This situation partly results from his mother being somewhat incapacitated by life in the new land, while his father struggles with making a living, helping his wife, and dealing with British oppression. Uri’s surrogate parents include Ephraim, a young repairman and underground agent, who is obsessed with developing a secret weapon—another recurring motif in Oz’s short fiction; the old poet, Nehamkin, who speaks the obsessive language of biblical prophecy; and the seriously ill Dr. Emanuel Nussbaum, whose beloved, Mina Oswald, has left him and Israel behind.
Four other stories in Where the Jackals Howl, and Other Stories illustrate how, in the context of pioneering in an often hostile environment, obsession and alienation may impair romantic love. This theme is also exemplified in the stories “Crusade” and “Late Love,” in Unto Death, and Oz’s uncharacteristically brief (ten-page) “Setting the World to Rights,” included in The Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories (1979, edited by Emanuel Litvinoff).
In “Nomad and Viper,” Geula’s natural, unfulfilled sexuality and the negative relations between Israeli settlers and native Arabs cause her to have conflicting emotions about a young Arab goatherd to whom she is drawn. She meets him in an orchard, which, with the garden, is a recurrent, often biblical symbol in Oz’s short fiction. When the young goatherd—friendly, polite, but nervous—is frightened off by her intensity, her conflict is resolved into hatred toward Arabs and the delusion of an attempted rape.
“The Trappist Monastery” ends with the ironic revelations that the main character, Itcheh, passionately cares about Bruria, despite his exaggeratedly apparent indifference toward her. His show results from the strains of combat and maintaining his image as legendary military hero. Instead, he really is just a Romanian immigrant who plans to retire from the army as soon as he can to join a soccer team or head a bus service. Unfortunately, Bruria begins to carry on affairs with other men. While pursuing Bruria on an erroneous chase, Itcheh’s Jeep breaks down in Arab territory, near the landmark of the story’s title, with implied fatal disaster for Itcheh and his malevolent passenger, Nahum, a military medic jealous of Itcheh.
Death in combat permanently severs the romantic relationship between central character Batya Pinski and her husband, Abraham, in the story “A Hollow Stone.” Abraham’s fervor about socialism in Israel and Spain began his emotional drift from his wife even before he went to fight and die in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s. This makes Abraham yet another deserter in Oz’s short fiction. The placid existence of the fish in Batya’s aquarium, a repeated symbol in the story, where the hollow stone of the title is located, differs greatly from that of the people on Batya’s kibbutz.
The fifty-page novelette “Upon This Evil Earth” has a complex intertwining of themes like many of Oz’s stories—the term “story” being what Oz prefers, or “prose narrative,” following the Hebrew language, instead of the term “fiction.” Gilead the Gileadite lives in the hard country between the fertile lands of the Ammonites and the tribe of Ephraim. Both his external surroundings and internal temperament lead to an almost existentialist alienation that is shared by his son Jephthah. As a result of this alienation, neither Gilead nor Jephthah is capable of true romantic love. Jephthah’s inability to love is aggravated by his being the son of a concubine (reflecting the biblical account) from Ammon (not in the biblical account), making him only the half brother of the sons from Gilead’s proper Israelite wife. Jephthah repeatedly asserts that he does not feel complete allegiance either to the Israelites or to the Ammonites, much as a liberal modern Israeli might feel when caught between obsessed Israelis and obsessed Arabs, neither willing to acknowledge the vision and values of the other.
Sergei Unger in “Late Love” represents the Israeli obsessed by an enemy, in Unger’s case the Russian Communists. He is so obsessed that he frankly confesses he has given up romantic love. The story shows how he has missed his chance for this love in a constant companion on the lecture tour for much of his life, Liuba Kaganovskaya. Unger’s parallel opposite in “Crusade” is the medieval Count Guillaume of Touron, whose name suggests the pride of a tower and the monument from the Crusades explained in “The Trappist Monastery”: “Latrun,” from “Le Touron des Chevaliers—The Tower of the Knights.” The Count is an anti-Semite obsessed with exterminating Jews in general and, in particular, the Jew whom he repeatedly and paranoically imagines has infiltrated his Crusader band. Only at the end of “Crusade,” when the Count has suffered tremendously, learned to empathize with all other human beings, and killed himself as a symbol of equating himself to a Jew, does he finally return to the long lost feelings of love for his wife.
Sadly, the central character of “Setting the World to Rights,” whose very anonymity, being never named, is symbolic of his commonness, never modifies the mainspring of his being: his hatred of all things he is obsessively sure are wrong. He has magnified his kibbutz occupation of repairman to monstrous proportions, thinking everything in the world needs repairing but, ironically, is unable to repair himself. A bachelor, he lives alone, unable to find love or let it into his life, and at the story’s end he hangs himself in the kibbutz orchard. An orchard or the Garden of Eden represents the possibilities of life, growth, and love, making the setting an ironically symbolic opposite of the repairman’s suicide and life’s work.