[Oz's novels and novellas] are studded with interesting details about Jewish life in general and Israeli immigrant life in particular, but they share a peculiar emotional flatness and shed a curiously dim light on lives that on the surface are all excitement…. "The Hill of Evil Counsel,"… a collection of three long stories with interwoven themes and characters, is of a piece with the rest of his work, though the last story, "Longing," gets a bit deeper, below the skin of the main character than the others do.

All three stories take place during the last days of the British Mandate, in a ragged, sun-bleached, lower-middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem. In the first (and title) story, it is May, 1946. The full-scale war that will erupt two years later is a shadowy threat that the neighborhood's mostly Polish and Russian immigrants (who want at all costs to avoid more disruption in their lives) prefer not to contemplate…. [The family Oz writes about consists of] Dr. Kipnis, a diffident, middle-aged veterinarian; his bitter, bleakly hysterical wife, Ruth, who constantly taunts her husband with idealized memories of her haute-bourgeoise Warsaw childhood; and their sensitive, dreamy son, Hillel (who turns up under another name in the other stories)…. Typically, Oz drops the wife just when she starts to get interesting. [He has her run off with an admiral, a well-known roué]. Plot development seems to bore him, and it is not unusual for him simply to abandon his characters when their lives threaten to become too complicated.

In the second story, "Mr. Levi," which appears to take place some months after the first, the tension of a prewar national state of mind is palpable…. Mr. Levi is an unpleasant but believably authoritative middle-aged resistance fighter (about whom we learn almost nothing), who is smuggled into the house of what seems to be the family that we have just read about in the previous story, now miraculously reunited. No mention whatever is made of the mother's nocturnal escapade…. It is a bit disconcerting … to see the mother calmly setting the family tea cart and passing bowls of oranges when just a few pages earlier we have witnessed her doppelgänger "racing deep into the desert, across mountains and valleys, and onward, to Baghdad, Bombay, Calcutta" with the belching admiral in his silver Rolls-Royce. (pp. 79-80)

"Longing" is about a middle-aged Viennese-born doctor named Emanuel Nussbaum, who is dying of cancer. Nussbaum lives next door to the (or a) veterinarian. The story is written as a series of confessional letters that Nussbaum sends to his former mistress, a doggedly unsentimental, blunt psychologist (from Nussbaum's descriptions of her, she seems rather heartless, but I'm not sure Oz intends that) who has emigrated recently to New York. In the first two stories, Oz captures a strong sense of place and mood but conveys little of what anyone is feeling, except for the not particularly riveting yearnings of the young boy. In this one, the main character is at least given the chance to recall the strong currents of his life, although in a kind of epistolatory-résumé style. (p. 80)

[Oz] seems unwilling or unable to come to grips with his characters' feelings about the fragility of either their past lives or their present ones. It is as if he were writing a war play in which no one exhibited fear or terror or ever mentioned guns, blood, or death. Perhaps, being a Sabra, he simply takes those things for granted. But when the closest he can come to describing fear is to anthropomorphize nature, as he does in "Mr. Levi" … it trivializes both the depth and the magnitude of the collective national recovery that all his work strains to convey. (p. 81)