An overdose of history

The similarities to his father are significant, because Oz has spent a lifetime running from them. At the age of 14, he turned his back on his lonely Jerusalem childhood and went looking for a happier, simpler existence on a kibbutz. He may have found a better life, but his phantoms came too. Now, at the age of 65, Oz is finally trying to lay them to rest. His autobiographical tale is an intensely personal and moving story, set against Israel’s first troubled days. It gives a heart-wrenching account of the disintegration of his parents’ marriage and the tragic death of his mother, Fania, who committed suicide when he was just 12.

So why did Oz, whose most famous novels include Black Box, My Michael and The Same Sea, write this book now? “I suppose it had to do with age,” he says, sighing deeply and settling into his chair. “I reached an age where the anger, rebelliousness and spite were gone. I was just left with a million questions I had never asked and which would never have been answered even if I had.”

Today Oz lives in the desert. It is as romantic and isolated as it sounds. At the end of his street, vast barren brown mountains sweep improbably away into the distance. The stillness and silence are profound. Sometimes all you can hear is your own breathing and the hot wind as it blows through the valley. Oz, who moved to Arad 18 years ago because his son suffered asthma, walks in the desert every morning. “It’s like living by the ocean,” he says. “It changes with the light and seasons, by dusk and by sunrise.”

It is a far cry from Jerusalem in the 1940s where everyone lived on top of each other in tiny, dark, cramped apartments. The country then was controlled by the British and poverty was widespread. Oz — an only child — remembers Jerusalem as a city without joy or laughter. Most of the population, like his parents who arrived in the 1930s, were fugitives fleeing European anti-Semitism. Many were scholars, poets or writers.

Oz was born in 1939. His mother studied history and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem but gave up her career to become a housewife. His father, Arieh, a fussy, humourless man, was a librarian in the National Library, and dreamt of becoming a celebrated academic like his uncle, Joseph Klausner, a professor of Hebrew literature at Hebrew University. It was a dream that was never fulfilled, and this failure soured Arieh’s life and his relationship with Oz.

For Arieh and Fania, Israel was a last resort. They viewed it as a backward, Middle Eastern province and longed for the culture and sophistication of Europe, even while Europeans were scrawling “Jews go home to Palestine” on walls. Both lost friends and relatives in the Holocaust, which provided an unspoken but horrifying backdrop to Oz’s early years.

In 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, and the Arabs responded by laying siege to Jewish Jerusalem, cutting it off from the rest of the country. In May 1948, Israel was declared a state and the neighbouring Arab countries invaded. These were difficult times. Jerusalem was bombed regularly and food was scarce. The family’s basement flat was turned into a makeshift shelter, and at night Oz fell asleep on a mattress between his parents, surrounded by the snores and moans of his neighbours.

At age 9, he recalls how one of his mother’s friends was killed by a shell when she went outside to fetch a bucket. The same day his pet turtle, Mimi, was sliced in half by shrapnel. That night his mother came to him in bed, and the two of them cried together.

Though it was a difficult childhood, Oz has no regrets. “It was very rich, because history, world politics, and clashing ideas became part of my nursery. I don’t look back with self pity, I merely see it as an overdose of history.”

In the book, Oz describes himself as a lonely and precocious child who read incessantly and was forced to behave like an adult. His parents told him he was destined for greatness — his father hoped he would be an academic genius, while his mother dreamt that Oz would somehow express what she had been unable to.

“It’s a syndrome,” says Oz, speaking in his slow, deliberate manner. “Not just among immigrants in Jerusalem then, but also among immigrants in Britain today. As soon as the family finds out it will not fulfil its dreams in the promised land, it becomes some kind of Cape Canaveral, and the child is the missile that carries the family’s frustrated aspirations skywards.”

With hindsight, Oz assumes that his mother suffered from depression. No one discussed it, however, not even after her death. Day after day in her final years, she sat by the window gazing out with unseeing eyes. She did not sleep, eat or go out. Once, when Oz came home, he found her sitting on a chair in the garden staring into space. It had been pouring with rain for hours, and she was soaked to the skin.

After Fania killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills in her sister’s flat in Tel Aviv, neither Oz nor his father, who died 30 years later, could bring themselves to talk about it. It was as if Fania had never existed. “We felt ashamed, embarrassed and guilty as if we were partners in a crime that no one knew about,” he says.

Today, he believes that he understands his mother’s heartbreak. “She was more intelligent than my father, but was supposed to remain in the background, run the house, raise the kids, balance the family’s mean budget and shut up. She was talented, creative and inventive. She was probably the best storyteller I ever heard, but she had no way of expressing an ounce of what was within her.”

In the wake of Fania’s death, Oz turned on his family, and in 1954 moved to Kibbutz Hulda in north Israel against his father’s wishes. He built up his body with food and exercise and changed his name from Klausner to Oz. “I vowed I would never write or read books again,” he says, and shrugs, a gesture describing the pure impossibility of such thoughts.

Life on the kibbutz was not easy and Oz, loquacious by nature, barely talked about his past. “I wanted to be born again,” he says. “This was a young, healthy, uncomplicated world, and I was ashamed to unload my baggage and share my Jerusalem tale.” Yet as Oz found out, you can never truly turn your back on the past. “Of course I brought myself with me to the kibbutz,” he says.

In his early twenties, the kibbutz sent Oz to university in Jerusalem to study literature and philosophy because it desperately needed a literature teacher. On his return, he began to write. His first novel, Where Jackals Howl, won a literary award. Three years later, My Michael became one of Israel’s biggest-selling books. In 1987, Black Box broke records when it sold 70,000 copies in Israel in the first four months alone. Oz has written more than 20 books, which have been published around the world. He has won many international awards and in 1987 became a professor at Ben Gurion University, an honour his father never achieved.

Oz married Nili, a fellow kibbutznik, when he was 21. They are still happily married and have three children and four grandchildren. It was partly for them that Oz wrote this book, having never really told them about his childhood.

For Oz, a pacifist who has been an active member of the peace movement since he fought in the Six Day War in 1967, this book brought many unexpected insights. “It helped me realise that everyone in this country is injured, Jewish and Arab alike. Everyone has been poisoned by an overdose of history. It showed me that Israel is a refugee camp. It’s not just Gaza, it’s all of us, even those living in luxurious villas.

“This is not a Hollywood cowboy movie with good guys and bad guys,” he adds. “This is a conflict between right and right. It’s a conflict between two victims. Israelis and Palestinians are soon going to need all the empathy they can get, because they will have to make immensely painful decisions. Europe can help by giving reassurance and understanding, not criticism and Victorian finger-wagging.”

After all these decades of observing Israel develop into a nation, is Oz happy with the results? “I love Israel even at times when I cannot stand it,” he says.

We get up to leave. On his desk stands a picture of his mother, father and himself as a young boy. An ironic smile hovers on Fania’s beautiful face. Arieh looks earnest and bookish. Oz, in his neatly buttoned clothes, has the sweet face of innocence.

Oz waves goodbye from the gate in his garden. He is worried he has talked too much. “Take care on your way home,” he says. “The light shines in your eyes at this time of day and the road isn’t good.” He is right. Out of Arad, the sun, which is starting its descent, does indeed dazzle. The intense heat of the afternoon has cooled and the dusty brown hills are turning warm red. A herd of goats kicks up a plume of sand, and away in the distance three boys play leapfrog, laughing and pushing each other into the barren earth.

A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz, is published by Chatto & Windus, £17.99 (offer £14.39 plus £2.25 p&p)