Amos Oz

by Amos Klausner

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Amos Oz Long Fiction Analysis

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Amos Oz’s fiction is often concerned with domestic relationships, portrayed in a realistic manner. However, within this realistic facade, his characters struggle with internal conflicts between body and spirit, their own desires and social constraints, irrational impulses opposed to stability, and their faith in Israel tinged with skepticism. While they dream of perfection and long for the Messiah, they must navigate the dangerous reality of life in Israel. Most of Oz’s novels are serious psychological studies, thoughtful and self-assured, and occasionally lightened by a mordant humor. Many of his characters believe they are living in a dream world, especially when people they believe they know suddenly behave in uncharacteristic ways.

In style, Oz is innovative. His novels take varying shapes, from Black Box, an epistolary novel, to the free-flowing lyricism of The Same Sea, which is told in poetic paragraphs that intersperse the past and the present, the near and the far. Among the story’s extraordinary range of voices, the reader sometimes hears the ghostly voice of the deceased. Some of his novels have a claustrophobic feeling, which mirrors the claustrophobia of the intense familial relationships they portray.

My Michael

My Michael, published in 1968, became Oz’s breakthrough work and made him one of Israel’s best young novelists. My Michael is the story of its first-person narrator, Hannah Greenbaum, a thirty-year-old native of Jerusalem who is married to Dr. Michael Gonen, a geologist and, in Hannah’s own words, a “good-natured man.” Unlike traditional plots, this novel is structured by Hannah’s slow decline into mental illness during her courtship and marriage.

Michael and Hannah meet when they are both students: he a third-year geology student and she a first-year student at Hebrew University. In the mornings she teaches at a kindergarten. One of the first clues to Hannah’s instability is her relationship to her deceased father, whose presence in Hannah’s mind is felt from the beginning of the novel, when she interrupts her story of how she and Michael met with the incongruous declaration that she has never loved anyone as much as her father. She also fondly recalls a bout of diphtheria she suffered when a child, from which she recovered reluctantly. Memories and fantasies of childhood are interspersed throughout her narrative.

Michael is an only child, and his family hopes he will be a scholar. After a brief courtship with Hannah, he proposes marriage. Hannah accepts, but she also realizes that Michael bores her. Their son, Yair, is born near the end of their first year of marriage. Hannah gives up her studies in literature at Hebrew University and Michael passes his exams, but money is still scarce. Hannah has a nervous breakdown, and when she is ill, Michael is called up for military duty in the 1956 war, giving Hannah new fantasies of military excursions mixed with news from the front. Eventually, her mental condition improves, and Michael returns from military duty. Their days settle down to routine: Michael finishes his thesis and Hannah is once again pregnant, yet she remains lost in fantasy and Michael remains unable to enter her interior world. My Michael is distinguished by the remarkable integration of Hannah’s inner and outer worlds and its pattern of significant motifs woven delicately throughout the narrative.

Black Box

Black Box is written as a series of letters among Alex Gideon, his former wife Ilana, her new husband Michael, and Alex and Ilana’s son Boaz. Interspersed with these letters are communications from Alex’s lawyer Zakheim and from Ilana’s sister Rahel, whose calm common sense is in direct contrast to Ilana’s passionate temperament, which is...

(This entire section contains 1410 words.)

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still in thrall to her first husband. The novel is further enriched by Michael’s constant quoting of scripture; reviews of Alex’s new book,The Desperate Violence: A Study in Comparative Fanaticism; court records; and reports from a private investigator.

The sixteen-year-old Boaz is the apparent instigator of the plot. Ilana first writes to Alex, who is now a university professor in Chicago, to help her find Boaz, who has a penchant for physical violence and is often in trouble. A boy who deeply resents both his parents and Ilana’s second husband (Michael), Boaz is gradually won over by Michael’s ability to get his son out of trouble by using his vast network of relatives. Slowly, the reader recognizes that each character is a fanatic: Alex is a hardened officer with the Israel Defense Forces who is obsessed with terrorism, Ilana is a slave to masochistic sex, Michael is driven by his absolute religious devotion, and Boaz is ruled by his thirst for independence.

A “black box” is a term used to describe an airplane’s recorders of flight data and cockpit communications. In the case of an airplane crash, for example, recorders are useful for the data they might reveal about the cause of that crash. The black box and its functions are apt metaphors for the novel, which centers on the correspondence between Alex and Ilana as they rehash their troubled marriage and divorce of seven years earlier, as well as their courtship. As the correspondence continues over the course of a year, Alex and Ilana gradually get over their bitterness toward each other. The wealthy Alex establishes Boaz in his own childhood home in Israel. Slowly, Boaz “finds” himself there, establishes a commune, and pursues farming and astronomy while rehabilitating his house. He remains an idealist and perhaps the truest embodiment of the Zionist tradition.

In the second half of the novel, the reader discovers that Alex is dying of cancer. He returns to his old home in Israel, where Boaz cares for him; Ilana and her young daughter also nurse him. Michael, at first outraged that Ilana has rejoined Alex, relents and gives both Ilana and Alex his blessing when Alex informs him that he has but a few months to live. Only in the proximity of death are these four strong characters able to find true reconciliation.

To Know a Woman

To Know a Woman is the story of Yoel Ravid, told in the omniscient third person but confined to the viewpoint of this tired, recently widowed and retired, forty-seven-year-old man. Employed for twenty-three years with the Israeli secret service, he was on an assignment in Helsinki, Finland, when his wife had a fatal accident. Perhaps because of his wife’s death and the responsibility of taking care of his sixteen-year-old daughter, or perhaps because, as he says, his concentration is failing, he retires from his job and rents a house near Tel Aviv to live with his mother, mother-in-law, and daughter.

Yoel starts to fill the void first by tinkering around the house compulsively, performing small repairs. He expands his reach to the garden, while his mind is taken up with the past and attempts to understand his deceased wife and slightly impaired daughter. Recurrent images fill his mind, particularly of a paraplegic he saw on a street in Helsinki. He has an affair with an American neighbor who lives with her brother, his daughter finds a boyfriend, and he resists the efforts of the secret service to woo him into one last mission, one that would have been fatal. Occasionally, he gives in to paranoia; he has joyous moments when the sheer beauty of the landscape overwhelms him. His daughter moves out to live with her boyfriend, and although he has deep qualms about it, he heeds the advice of his friends and lets her set out on a life of her own.

Most important in this obsessive, claustrophobic novel, Yoel gives in to his real estate agent’s suggestion to volunteer at the local hospital, and there he finds his true calling. Surrounded by bloodstains, filth, and odors of urine, excrement, and sweat, he finds these elements bring him a certain joy; he knows he is alive, removed from the empty life he had lived since his wife’s death. He also discovers new powers in himself: He has the power to allay pain, soothe the distraught, and pacify the terrified. He is able to summon a mixture of compassion and firmness that the hospital patients need, and he is often called by doctors to calm a patient impervious to injections. The reader leaves this former spy using his trained ability of concentration to stare into the blackness of disease, trauma, and death, hoping for an occasional flicker of light.

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