RaveThe New York Review of BooksThis is a sad book, a tale of twisted lives and stunted hopes. The Eurocentric prejudices of Oz’s grandmother provide a few moments of comic relief; she was so obsessed with the ‘germs’ infecting everybody and everything in the Levant that she took three hot baths a day and forced her husband to shake out the carpets twice a day. Oz powerfully evokes the sounds and sights of the 1940s but we hear none of the clichés about heroic young men and women, silent, thoughtful, and self-disciplined, fighting for independence and making the desert bloom in remote outposts … Against the background of intermittent war in Jerusalem, Oz dissects the private tragedy that, as we now learn for the first time, has haunted his entire life and indirectly shaped some of the characters of his novels and short stories. The reader soon becomes aware that he is peeling away layer after layer of a long-repressed, painful past.
