Six years without Amos Oz, six books by the giant of Israeli literature (and his remedy against fanaticism)

On December 28, 2018, Amos Ozone of the most prominent writers of contemporary literature, died in Tel Aviv at the age of 79 due to cancer. He left a literary and political legacy that continues to resonate six years after his departure. Recognized for his prolific work, which includes 18 books and more than 450 articles and essays, the author deeply explored the internal and external conflicts of Israeli society. In 2017 he said that an independent Palestinian state was necessary: ​​“We must divide the house into two smaller apartments. “There is no other option.”

Born as Amos Klausner on May 4, 1939 in JerusalemOz grew up in a family of Jewish immigrants who had fled Eastern Europe. His mother, Fania Mussmanoriginally from Rivne (present-day Ukraine), and her father, Yehuda Arie Klausnerborn in Lithuania, settled in British Mandate Palestine in 1933. Oz’s childhood was marked by tragedy: his mother committed suicide when he was only 12 years old. Two years later he decided to change his last name to “Oz”, which in Hebrew means “courage”, and joined Kibbutz Hulda, where he began to forge his identity as a writer.

It was in this environment that he published his first short stories while studying literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem between 1960 and 1963. Later, he expanded his training at the University of Oxford and, since 1991, he was a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Oz’s work, translated into more than 35 languages, is characterized by its ability to address the ideological, geographical and historical tensions that run through Israel.

the novel My Michaeloriginally published in 1968, is set in the Jerusalem from the 1950s. From the perspective of a dissatisfied woman, she recounts the deterioration of her marriage to a geology student and her refuge in a world of violent fantasies and imaginary encounters. It was an immediate success in the Israeli literary market: in its first 18 months it sold nearly 40,000 copies. It transcended the borders of Israel, was translated into several languages ​​and was made into a film in 1976, in a Hebrew adaptation.

It also generated intense debates in Israel due to its allusions to Arab-Jewish relations. Some critics described the work as “politically dangerous and subversive.” Others said the Arabs were “about to commit a pogrom.” Some accused her of being “anti-Zionist” and having a bias toward Arabs. “I think that the implications of the Arab-Israeli conflict, however indirect, angered some readers and, at the same time, legitimized certain attitudes that were present but had not been expressed before, at least not in literature,” he said. the author.

An essay on literature. The Argentine writer Claudia Piñeiro He assures that it is a fundamental book. “A text that I use a lot, beyond his novels, is a small book called The story begins. There he analyzes the different beginnings of stories from novels and short stories. It is a very nice writing lesson. Speak well of him: think about the texts of others. “I use that book a lot,” he told Infobae Culture.

This novel was published in 1995. The protagonist is a twelve-year-old Jewish boy during 1947 during the last year of the British Mandate of Palestine. He befriends a British police sergeant interested in biblical Israel and the Hebrew language. In exchange, the boy accepts English classes. This relationship united by mere curiosity is the way that Oz finds to deal with a key theme in his work: coexistence with the other.

It is the only time Oz dives into the waters of autobiography. He does it in a novel way, the genre he handles best. The story begins with his childhood in Jerusalem after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. The book has been translated into 28 languages ​​and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. For this book he won the Quarterly-Wingate Jewish Literary Prize for non-fiction, the Koret Literary Prize for biography, autobiography or literary study, and the Goethe Prize. In 2015, Natalie Portman brought the book to the cinema: she was the director, the screenwriter and the actress who played Oz’s mother.

One of Oz’s most acclaimed novels. It takes place in 1939 when the Nazis enter Poland. There, the Jewish mathematician and watchmaker Elisha Pomeranz He is forced to flee through the forests and leave his wife Stefa. Both manage to survive and, once the war is over, both seek the long-awaited reunion: she is in the Soviet Union and he in Israel.

One of the last interviews that Amos Oz It was in May of this year to the Spanish media The Country. “Fanaticism leads to violence,” he said, at his home in Tel Aviv. Blinded extremism has always existed in the world, and to understand it better this author wrote this essay. There it reads: “Literature is always the answer, because literature contains an antidote to fanaticism through the injection of imagination.”