Until now, Oz has never written about his unhappy mother and the January day in 1952 when she walked back through the rain to a moldy flat and an overdose of sedatives...He will make up for that erasure with this indelible memoir, circling so often around the wound, inching up and closing in, that finally Fania's furious son has no other ground to stand on … A Tale of Love and Darkness also mourns the death of the socialist-Zionist dream of a just society and a strange new nationalism, predicated on research universities and string quartets, on comparative literature and experimental agriculture, that turned instead into an acid reflux of checkpoints, demolitions, transit camps, penal colonies and strategic hamlets...And yet, determined to remember every minute leading up to his mother's suicide, he also sees through a child's eye the prelude to statehood in a Promised Land.'
Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, thought to be the biggest-selling literary work in Israeli history, is an exploration of why his mother killed herself, and the effect on him, a sensitive, intelligent boy growing up in Jerusalem during the last years of the British mandate and the war of independence. It is one of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read … He reveals a huge talent for the big narrative picture, for Dickensian character portraits and an expert fusion of history and personal life … Oz's book is a testament to a family, a time and a place. And throughout it there is the voice of the child who, 50 years later, still cries out for his dead mother.
[Oz’s] memoir, in a translation that preserves the author’s gorgeous, discursive style and his love of wordplay, is a social history embedded within an autobiography … The book is a modernist collage. At times, Oz gives it entirely over to its constituent characters and their stories and soliloquies. The structure leaves Oz prone to excessive digressions and redundancies, some of which come across as either unintentional or unintentionally jarring. In these sometimes meandering asides, Oz seems to be asking the reader’s indulgence. But he richly rewards a patient audience over the bulk of this sophisticated and searing memorial.
A Tale of Love and Darkness (beautifully translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange) appears to merely chronicle Oz's life from childhood in British-ruled Jerusalem to literary fame in Kibbutz Hulda, where Oz (born Amos Braz) still lives and where he adopted his nom de plume. But there are no single straight lines in Oz's narratives; for him, all things are plural … Oz describes what it was (and is) like to live in a country that, since its inception, has been constantly under threat; and he tells of the painful relationship between Arab and Jew … It is impossible to give a full account of this book's riches. Oz has allowed his autobiography to flow along a rocky course, with numerous starts and various endings.
As he writes about himself and his family, Oz is also writing part of the history of the Jews: of their flight from Europe, their arrival in the Land and then of the penury and hardships of life in the pre-state, of the war and agreements that led to the emergence of Israel and, finally, of what came after. This gives the book a feeling of scope … Although there is a strain of self-loathing that permeates this story, there is no self-pity. There is plenty of forgiveness to go around, except for the writer himself. For him, there is no forgiveness, no kindness. Oz inspects, ridicules and exposes himself at every opportunity, and yet he remains lovable, a trick that is an integral part of this writer's magic. We are in the hands here of a capable, practiced seducer.
This 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.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel … In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one. A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
