Among those Israeli writers to emerge in the post-Palmah New Wave generation, Amos Oz appears to have been peculiarly blessed. As the interview with him makes clear, he came from a family of intellectuals on his father's side, and in his mother's family there were poets. Bred to city life in Jerusalem, he joined Kibbutz Hulda, located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem when he was fifteen years old, giving him the experience of communal socialist life. For three years, he was a student at Hebrew University. Thus, in moving back and forth between Kibbutz Hulda and the cities he has benefited from the best of both the rural and the urban Israeli experiences. Born in 1939, he knew Jerusalem when it was a divided city, and his early contacts with and observation of the Arabs close at hand no doubt have influenced his moderate political and humanitarian stance toward them, although having served in a tank unit in both the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, he knows their brutality in war as well as their smoldering resentment in peace. His knowledge of Israeli life in an infinitude of ways is both intimate and extensive, and to its expression he has brought an engaging and powerful narrative capability.

That talent is far-ranging, original, and inventive. An excellent judge of his material, Oz is accomplished in determining which literary structure is best suited to its exploitation, and he is as comfortable with the novel as with the short story and the novella. More to the point, he casts his narratives in a variety of forms, using letters, telegrams, documents, reports, and journals with the same assurance as he uses interior and exterior monologues and dialogues. Close to nature, his descriptions of desert and mountain, of summer heat and winter cold, of birds and animals come alive as indeed do his city pavements and buildings. Whatever his focus is, his scenes teem with the velocity and passion of life, and this is never more true than when he is exploring the inner recesses of human consciousness. To his narrative constructs, he brings the sense of timing, the precision and the intense concentration of the dramatist and the lyrical virtuosity of the poet. Versatility is a hallmark of his work.

Like Yehoshua, Oz was quick to grasp Western techniques. While he pays his respects to his immediate Israeli forbears Berdyczewski, Brenner and Agnon, it is clear that the Russians, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky have influenced him, and that figures as diverse as Melville, Flaubert and Sherwood Anderson have played significant roles in his literary maturation. Although the modernist themes of spiritual despair and sexual desperation pervade his stories, they nonetheless remain uniquely Israeli. Violence, irrationality, and malaise are often found, but unlike Yehoshua, Oz (despite the almost universal assumptions of his critics and readers) does not use his fictions directly to accommodate his political beliefs or to achieve desired political ends. That his stories do so indirectly is certain, but for him, as he iterates in the interview, the emphasis has always been on allowing the imagination free rein, and, in a sense, this is his guiding principle. In rejecting an ulterior sociopolitical motive, Oz releases his imagination to soar as it will, and soar it does to impressive lyrical and hallucinatory heights.

In my view, this uninhibited use of the imagination set into the besieged, austere Israeli landscape and mindscape with its sense of tragedy in the apocalyptic history of the Jews leading up to the Holocaust—a passage through time—and its desert mentality—a location in space—has produced a unique context for Oz's fiction. I would define that context as exotic realism. Having rejected the aspirational and exhortatory romanticism of the Hebrew writers who preceded him, he nonetheless has infused the reality of localized Israeli life with the exoticism of romantic literature: its traditional emphases on faraway places, strange practices, individualism, unpredictability (the breakdown of causality), madness, attraction to opposites, dreams, sensuousness, alchemy, sentimentalism, transcendence (levitation), rebellion, and escapism. His protagonists accept finite limits but they push against these boundaries—borders are everywhere present in the stories—as if infinity can be sensed if not realized.

Oz's career as a writer began in 1965, when he was twenty-six years old, with the publication in Israel of Artzot Hatan [Artzot ha’ tan] (Where the Jackals Howl), a collection of nine short stories. This was followed in 1966 by Makom Acher (Elsewhere, Perhaps), his first novel. His second novel and third work, Michael Sheli (My Michael) published in 1968 brought him to the forefront of Israeli writers and launched him on his already broad but still rapidly expanding international career. In Israel, Michael Sheli went into repeated printings, selling an unprecedented 50,000 copies. My Michael was the first of his books to be translated into English, by Nicholas de Lange, in collaboration with the author, and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1972. My discussion of Oz's canon will begin with My Michael and follow the order of publication of his works in their appearances in English. …

UNTO DEATH

In Israel, Oz's two novellas Crusade and Late Love were published by Sifriat Poalim in 1971 under the title Ad Mavet two years before the publication of Touch the Water, Touch the Wind in 1973. In the United States, the two novellas, translated by Nicholas de Lange in collaboration with the author, were issued by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich under the title Unto Death two years later, in 1975. Whatever the minimal loss of reputation Oz suffered at the hands of American critics from the confusions and frustrations of Touch the Water, Touch the Wind he recovered in the perspicuity and descriptive power of Unto Death. The two novellas, linked by the theme of misguided wanderers seeking the Kingdom of Heaven, one Christian, one Jewish, ironically mired in their earthly paranoias, primarily use linear reality and thus make only minor demands, in phantasmagoria and fantasies, on readers to realign temporal and spatial configurations. While both are allegorical quest narratives, they are firmly set into historical perspectives with which we are familiar: Europe in the time of the Crusades and Israel moving into its third decade, surrounded by enemies and increasingly transfixed by the attractions and repulsions of its required military might. Since the Arabs are not present in eleventh century France in Crusade and are regarded as only a secondary menace in Late Love, it is Europe that emerges as the ultimate enemy of the Jews, an enemy whose destructiveness is so deeply ingrained that it requires a greater counter-destructiveness to defeat it. The result is a death-dealing totality from which no one escapes. The real cauldron for terror and havoc is human blood-lust. Oz seems to be arguing that the Europeans have exercised it all too often over the centuries at the expense of the Jews; the Jews, he implies, are wrong, if vengeance could be justified, even to fantasize about using it against the Europeans.¹

Oz's attraction to Europe is a natural one. His forebears were long resident there, and his parents' memories were of their lives in Russia and Poland. That experience lies just under the surface of much of Oz's work and he has a fondness for recalling it in specific fictional allusions to the Klausner family, to Grodno, the district in Poland from which they went to Palestine, and in veiled references: Pomeranz's village in Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, M_____, must surely derive from Mattersdorf, a centuries-old community where an early forebear settled. In the interview with Nitza Rosovsky mentioned above, Oz, speaking of the inheritances we carry in our genes, said, “Mine are European, and I am neither proud nor ashamed of it. This is my birth before birth. My parents used to speak with a mixture of longing and fear about the beautiful countries in which they grew up. They hoped that someday Jewish Jerusalem too would become a real city. It took me years to understand that by “real city” they meant a place with a cathedral, a river, and thick forests.”² This latter phrase in various combinations appears frequently in Oz's narratives, and it always stands for Europe. So strong is Oz's sense of it in the first novella of Unto Death that his descriptions of the crusade route, though he had never traversed it, were so accurate that “French critics,” he said in the same interview, “reacting to Crusade, wrote in great astonishment of the clarity of the description of the landscape, from the Rhone lands to northern Italy.”³

On the other hand, Oz had no delusions about the Jewish fixation with Europe. In a brief essay in Time, reflecting on Israel's thirtieth anniversary in 1978, he said, “For me, that long and sad love affair between Europe and ourselves, Christians and Jews, is over.”⁴ Freed from the fixation, Oz, again the virtuoso, employs a combination of Gothic laconicism and exotic realism to endow Crusade with a sharply vivid perspective of the twisted and tortured mindscape of Claude Crookback as he relates his trek across Europe under the command of his distant relative, Count Guillaume of Touron, from Avignon on their way to the Holy Land. Extracts from his journal become Oz's narrative. Their mission is not only to participate in the recovery of the Holy Land but “to expiate their sins through the hardship of the journey—for spiritual joy is achieved through suffering.”⁵ These crusaders, warriors, peasants, outlaws, and camp followers, few in number, leave the extermination of the Jewish ghettos to larger contingents of Christians, but they butcher every isolated Jew and every small band of Jews that they encounter. Even before the expedition begins, they burn a Jew at the stake. Subsequently, they rob a Jewish traveler and cut him down with arrows, root out a Jewish mother hiding in a haystack, dispatch her with one blow and then crush the head of her infant. Another Jew is tortured, blinded, driven through with a lance, beaten with an ax, and stabbed while his home is torched. These scenes are graphic and detailed, in order to heighten the sense of blood-lust and to convey the monumental hypocrisy of the crusaders who remain devout and worshipful as they move not so much toward the Holy Land as toward the Kingdom of Heaven. The irony is total and devastating, for they do not see the distinction between their protestations of Christian principle and the horrors they practice.

The horrors grow not only out of the butchering in which they indulge, but also from their increasing dread of having a secret Jew in their midst. They mistrust each other, suffer calamities on the road, the Count dies, and they are confronted with a severe winter that brings them to starvation. Still searching for the secret Jew, they are transfixed by their dread. In the end, only seven half-crazed, starving men are left, and their death is certain. Ironically, they have “expiated their sins through the hardships of the journey,” but in their savage scapegoating they have effectively put the Kingdom of Heaven out of their reach. Their frantic hatred of the Jews, their blood-lust and their primitivism, make this story an allegory of the human capacity for destructiveness.

The theme with which Unto Death grapples is not the problem of Christian intolerance. That is ancillary. Oz's concern is with the universal destructiveness of hatred and the dangerous fanaticism it breeds. No one people or religion has a monopoly on it. In Late Love, the second novella, Oz makes this point emphatically clear. The setting is switched from eleventh-century Europe to modern Israel, and the protagonist, Shraga Unger, is an elderly Jewish cultural worker, an old-fashioned Zionist, whose assignment is to give lectures at kibbutzim all over Israel. His ostensible subject is Russian Jewry, but he has become obsessed by what he believes to be the threat Russia poses to Israel's survival. Like the Count and Claude Crookback, he is paranoid and in dread. He seeks the destruction of the Russians as fervently as the crusaders seek the destruction of the Jews, and just as their fanaticism kills them, so his fanaticism heralds his end. Nothing mitigates his belief that there is a “Bolshevik plot to exterminate the Jewish people as a first step toward the dismemberment of the whole world” (98). Living alone, without the civilizing effect of a wife and family—the Count was also alone—he increasingly loses touch with reality, fantasizing more and more about a Jewish counterconspiracy to neutralize the Russians. Conflating time in his fantasy, he dreams of a massive preemptive strike led by the Israeli Army first against the Nazis and then against the present day Russians. In narrative prose that is dramatically rendered by Oz through an emphasis on strong, active verbs, Shraga invites his audience to revel in his demented vision:

Imagine: not in Lower Galilee, not in the wilderness of Paran, but in the forests of Poland. Jewish armored columns suddenly start streaming furiously across the dark Polish forests. They shatter everything that stands in their way with bursts of savage fire: long Nazi convoys, trenches, bleak fortifications. … Can you possibly share this grim fantasy with me: hundreds of furious Jewish tanks crossing the length and breadth of Poland, brutally trampling our murderers underfoot, inscribing a savage Hebrew message across the scorched earth with their tracks in letters of fire and smoke. … Can the heart contain it? My thirst still rages unquenched. … Then with lightning speed my tanks turn and thunder eastward. … With furious wrath they hound all the bands of butchers of the Jews: Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians. … The rage of the Jews all over the land. Defeated Red armies, fragments of shattered divisions. … The whole of Russia is falling … writhing in panic, writhing with the screams of desperate women … The vengeance of the Jews is erupting.

(154-157)

The idea of Jewish vengeance is totally repugnant to Oz and Late Love is the first of several works that consider the problem of fanaticism combined with the growing military prowess of Israel. Here it is an old man's delusion, an oddly twisted corruption of Zionist aspiration, seduced by the exigencies of living under siege for which the most pragmatic response is a fearlessly powerful military strike force. In The Hill of Evil Counsel, the collection of novellas that followed Unto Death, it is a child's delusion. Nowhere is it a viable response, for blood-lust can never be sanctioned, and at risk is the future of civilization. Because the Jews have suffered the most from blood-lust, it is the one option that can never be open to them. In presenting his readers with so much graphic horror, Oz may appear in Unto Death to be slipping away from his guiding principle of allowing the imagination free rein instead of making a political statement. But he is not. He is simply demonstrating once again his talent for exotic realism. The imaginative depiction of the graphic horror, along with character delineation, and the author's psychological insight into fantasy, delusion, and hypocrisy move far beyond a statement of political belief to the absolute need for human salvation. The imaginative presentation of this need is a primary function of literature. Oz's scope is cosmic and universal, and his work is directed to fulfilling that need. His sociopolitical message is certainly there, but as we have seen before, however compelling that message is, it remains subservient, even incidental to the creation of his artifact.⁶

THE HILL OF EVIL COUNSEL

The Hill of Evil Counsel, consisting of three novellas, entitled Har Ha’etza Ha’raah [Har he’etza ha’raah] and published by Am Oved in Israel in 1976, appeared in translation by Nicholas de Lange with Oz's collaboration, in 1978, issued by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. In the three novellas, Oz returns to the Jerusalem of his youth in 1946-47, the last years of the British Mandate, a period of turbulence and uncertainty, leading up to the War of Independence. In 1946 Oz was seven years old, and the novellas are an evocation of his boyhood impressions in those stirring days. Central to each of the three stories is a boy Oz's age, perceptive, sensitive, highly imaginative, awkward, pudgy, tormented by the neighborhood children, just on the edge of curiosity about sex, fascinated by gadgets and ardent in his advocacy of Hebrew nationalism.

In the title story, The Hill of Evil Counsel, (which appeared, prior to the book's publication, in the April, 1978 issue of Commentary)⁷ the boy is called Hillel and is the son of Hans Kipnis, a stolid but uninspired government veterinarian married to Ruth, a beautiful Polish Jew, spoiled, slightly neurotic, and unhappy with her husband and her life in Palestine. In Mr. Levi, the second novella, the boy is named Uriel and he is the son of a printer named Kolodny and his wife, not named, who is very similar to Ruth. In both of these novellas, the dominating point of view is that of the boy, and the women are frequently referred to simply as “Mother.” This leads to some minor confusion⁸ since two different boys are involved though they sound identical; and neither is an omniscient narrator though each is privy to information he is unlikely to possess. They all live in Tel Arza, a sparse suburb of Jerusalem within sight of the Schneller Barracks, the British military base. Among their neighbors is Dr. Emanuel Nussbaum, the protagonist of the third novella, Longing. He is a Viennese chemist, growing old alone, suffering from the departure of his lover and from the onset of cancer. Uriel, or Uri, is his constant companion. A number of the same characters appear in the several stories. This third story conveys the boy's point of view through the medium of Dr. Nussbaum's unaswered letters (which constitute the entire narrative) to his lover.

All three novellas provide a marvelous insight into the mood of Jerusalem as British rule is coming to its end. Filtered through the boys' consciousness, there is a sense of wonder and expectation that is refreshing in light of the parents' ambivalence about Jewish prospects for the future: the fathers are wary but committed to taking the necessary risk to establish a Jewish state, knowing full well that a war is coming; the mothers disdain this fervor, remain uncommitted and seek to escape their boredom through music or through daydreams harking back to happier childhoods.

Hillel's mother actually escapes. After Dr. Kipnis attends a crusty, outspoken British dowager, who has fainted at the theater, he and Ruth are invited to the High Commissioner's grand ball at his palace, located on the Hill of Evil Counsel, the center of British government in Jerusalem at the time. At the ball, Ruth becomes enamored of a British admiral, the hero of the Battle of Malta and a notorious womanizer, with whom she “elopes.” It is the crusty dowager who explains brutally to Dr. Kipnis that he has been abandoned, adding insult to injury by asking him how much his silence over the scandal will cost. In shock, Dr. Kipnis returns home from the ball at 4:00 A.M. sans his wife, while at the same time, Oz tells us

the admiral, his lady friend, his driver, and his bodyguard crossed a sleeping Jericho with blazing headlights and with an armed jeep for escort, and turned off toward the Kaliah Hotel on the shore of the Dead Sea. A day or two later, the black-and-silver Rolls Royce set out eastward, racing deep into the desert across mountains and valleys, and onward, to Baghdad, Bombay and Calcutta. All along the way, Mother soulfully recited poems by Mickiewicz in Polish. The admiral, belching highspiritedly like a big, good-natured sheepdog, ripped open her blue dress and inserted a red, affectionate hand. She felt nothing, and never for an instant interrupted her gazelle song. Only her black eyes shone with joy and tears. And when the admiral forced his fingers between her knees, she turned to him and told him that slain cavalrymen never die, they become transparent and powerful as tears.⁹

Ruth identifies the admiral with Tadeusz, the non-Jewish son of a Polish nobleman to whom she was attracted when she was sixteen and living a pampered life in Warsaw. He is no different from this cavalryman of her fantasies and when he comes along she goes off with him, never to be heard of again. Her desertion of her husband for this renegade dream-lover is akin to Hannah Gonen's desertion in My Michael. This novella has other affinities to that work and, as it does, in turn, to Madame Bovary. In all three stories acute sexual debasement symbolizes the wife's need to destroy her husband—a provincial doctor, educated but dull—signifying the culmination of the power struggle between them. In the wake of the marital disaster, a child is rejected and left with the unromantic, prodding father. Hans Kipnis is a slightly older Michael Gonen. Though Ruth sees the admiral as Tadeusz, he is more like Rudolphe, Emma's lover in Madame Bovary. If these associations were not enough, Oz goes Flaubert one step better by permitting his Emma to realize her wildest dream, not merely in going to the grand ball but in being swept off her feet by a nobleman as important as the original Emma's Marquis at Vaubyessard, one of whose illustrious ancestors was an admiral.

While Ruth is dancing in wild abandon with her British war hero, setting into motion the motif of sexual debasement, the simultaneous debasement of Hillel acts as a parallel. Hillel has been sent to spend the night with two other neighbors, his Russian piano teacher and her grown daughter. When Hillel is sound asleep, they loosen his pajamas, fondle him and rub themselves against his erect penis. His first climax comes to him as a dream while he continues to sleep. Symbolically, his initiation into manhood coincides with the loss of his mother. This double shock is almost too much for him. Reluctant to give up his childhood innocence, he recklessly climbs to the topmost branch of the tree in the backyard, going so high as to invite a lethal fall that would stave off his forced entry into an uncertain and dangerous adult world.

Of the second and third novellas, little need be said here, other than to observe that they flesh out the impending danger of war and the discomforts of living under British rule. In Mr. Levi and in Longing, various characters express their support of Jewish nationalism, their hatred of the British, and their dream of creating a super-weapon that would give the Jews either an equivalent to the atom bomb or a means of defying gravity by levitation to facilitate their escape from destruction. Uriel's impossible fantasies of Jewish military superiority, as we observed above, are no different from Shagra Unger's delusions.

The Hill of Evil Counsel was followed by the publication of Soumchi, a story for juveniles again involving a young boy in Jerusalem just after World War II. It appeared in America in 1980.¹⁰ A year later, Oz's first book, a collection of short stories entitled Where the Jackals Howl, was published.¹¹ Two years afterward, Oz's In The Land Of Israel came out.¹² It consisted of a series of articles based on interviews with a cross section of Israel's inhabitants. In the interests of space and because my primary concern is with Oz's longer works of fiction, these three works are merely noted here in passing. Both Where the Jackals Howl and In The Land Of Israel are important and have been so recognized,¹³ the former because of the quality of the stories that signified the arrival in Israel in 1965 of a new original talent, and the latter because it came to be widely read in the United States, making Oz's name a Jewish household word and creating for him the national audience that the novels and novellas, however remarkable, had not produced.

Notes

1. For other interpretations of Unto Death, see Ivan Sanders, “Unto Death,” The New Republic, vol. 173, no. 22 (November 29, 1975), pp. 36-37; Warren Bargad, “Amos Oz and the Art of Fictional Response,” Midstream, vol. 22, no. 9 (November, 1976), pp. 61-64; Zephyra Porat, “The Golem from Zion,” Ariel, no. 47 (1978), pp. 74-75; and Gershon Shaked, “Challenges And Question Marks,” Modern Hebrew Literature, vol. 10, nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1985), p. 21.

2. Rosovsky, “The Novelists: m,” p. 26.

3. Rosovsky, “The Novelists: m,” p. 26.

4. Amos Oz, “Reflections on an Anniversary,” Time, vol. 111, (May 15, 1978), p. 61.

5. Amos Oz, Unto Death (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 4. Further references to Unto Death will be included in the text.

6. The most succinct non-fictional prose corollary to the imaginatively presented anti-fanaticism in Unto Death is in Oz's “Reflections on an Anniversary,” cited above. A reading of this short statement will readily demonstrate two things: (1)How closely Oz's ideas are paralleled in his political prose and his fiction; and (2) how much richer the fiction is in his application of exotic realism to his subject.

7. Amos Oz, “The Hill of Evil Counsel,” Commentary, vol. 65, no. 4, pp. 72-87.

8. Lis Harris in “O Pioneers,” The New Yorker, vol. 54, no. 25 (August 7, 1978), pp. 79-81, incorrectly assumes that the Kipnis and Kolodny families are one and the same, observing that it is 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” [desertion]. Far from being confused, Oz's parallel representations, I believe, are intentional, given the similarity of these neighbors' lives. Though relativity does not provide the framework for these novellas, the absence/presence of the mother would both be legitimated by it.

9. Amos Oz, The Hill of Evil Counsel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 57-58. Further references to The Hill of Evil Counsel will be included in the text.

10. Soumchi first published by Am Oved in Israel in 1978; translated by Penelope Farmer and published in the United States by Harper and Row.

11. Where the Jackals Howl first published by Massada in Israel in 1965, containing nine short stories; translated by Nicholas de Lange and Philip Simpson and published in the United States by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich with one story deleted.

12. In the Land of Israel first published by Am Oved in Israel in 1983; translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura and published in the United States by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

13. See for example, Where the Jackals Howl: A. G. Mojtabai, “Perpetual Stranger in the Promised Land,” The New York Times Book Review (April 26, 1981), pp. 3, 35; Lesley Hazleton, “Tales from Israel,” The New Republic, vol. 184, no. 26 (June 27, 1981), pp. 39-40; Judith Chernaik, “The Story-Teller in the Kibbutz,” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4,095 (September 25, 1981) p. 1092; Daniel P. Deneau, [untitled review] Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter, 1982), pp. 82-84; Nehama Aschkenasy, “On Jackals, Nomads, and the Human Condition,” Midstream, vol. 29, no. 1 (January, 1983), pp. 58-60; Esther Fuchs, “The Beast Within: Women In Amos Oz's Early Fiction,” Modern Judaism, vol. 4, no. 3 (October 1984), pp. 311-320; and Leon I. Yudkin, “The Jackal and the Other Place: The Stories of Amos Oz,” 1948 And After: Aspects Of Israeli Fiction (Manchester: University of Manchester, 1984), pp. 135-140. In The Land Of Israel: Clive Sinclair, “Israelis Versus Jews,” The Sunday Times (November 6, 1983), p. 43; Irving Howe, “Journey To Other Sites,” Atlantic, vol. 252, no. 6 (December 1983), pp. 106-108; Eliahu Matz, “Oz's Odyssey,” Midstream, vol. 30, no. 3 (March 1984), pp. 62-63; Robert Alter, “The Writers and the War,” The New York Times Book Review (March 27, 1983), pp. 11, 34-35; Roger Rosenblatt, “From the Battlefield of Beliefs,” The New York Times Book Review (November 6, 1983), pp. 1, 46-47; Grace Schulman, “Israeli Visions of Israel,” “Book World,” The Washington Post (November 13, 1983) pp. 4, 14; Steven G. Kellman, [untitled review] The Village Voice, vol. 29, no. 7 (February 14, 1984), pp. 57-59; and Ruth R. Wisse, “Matters of Life & Death,” Commentary, vol. 77, no. 4 (April 1984), pp. 68, 70-71.