Wizardry of Oz

At 73, Amos Oz vows that each story will be his last, but he still has more to tell.

By ROBERT SLATER
amos oz 521 (photo credit: Reli Avraham)
amos oz 521
(photo credit: Reli Avraham)
While writing a book, Amos Oz rises each morning at 5 a.m., gets dressed, then leaves his home on a sleepy suburban street in A rad, a small town in the mountains between Beersheba and the Dead Sea, to take a brisk 30-minute walk through the desert near his home. As he walks, he repeats out loud the dialogue he has written the day before. “I need to hear my characters speak, their voice, their accent,” Oz, Israel’s most successful writer, tells The Jerusalem Report. “Writing is a musical work no less than it is a literary work.”
Just turned 73, the Jerusalem-born author has led a split life. H e has created acclaimed literary works including My Michael (1968), The Hill of Evil Counsel (1976) and The Land of Israel (1983) that many say provide the most sensitive portraits ever penned of Israeli life.
The New York Times called My Michael “one of the most accomplished foreign novels to appear here in the last few years.”
At the same time, he has also served as a self-described “political guerilla,” petitioning right-wing politicians to soften their views.
Of late, Oz assails the government less, but he admits that he is incapable of slowing down his writing, despite having authored 27 works that have been translated into 40 languages.
W hen writing his last few books, he has vowed to himself that each one would be his last. But then new characters arouse his imagination and he returns to his desk.
His latest book, Between Friends, a collection of short stories about Israeli kibbutz life, became an instant Israeli bestseller. An English-language version is on the way. Oz continues to teach Modern Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba.
How does he know whether to write a novel or speak out publicly to try to change government policy? “Each time I agree with myself 100 percent, I don’t write a novel. I write an angry article telling the government to go to hell. Each time I find myself in a slight disagreement with myself – in other words I hear more than one view – then at least I know I am pregnant with a story,” he says.
He keeps two ballpoint pens on his desk. He uses one to tell the government to go to hell, the other to tell stories.
All his life he has been surrounded by books, heavily influenced by them, entranced with their texture, scent, and content. As a boy of 5, he learned to type and precociously described himself as a writer. At 7, he was so enamored of books that he wished he could literally grow up to be one – for personal safety.
“There was,” he recalls, “a strong feeling in Jerusalem that we are all going to be killed in a second Holocaust. So I thought it was safer to grow up as a book.”
To this day, he spends most of his waking hours each day in a book-filled basement study at his home, alternating between sitting on a desk chair and standing behind a lectern to ease the chronic back pain that increases the more he sits.
He did not grow up to become a book. But even as a student he loved telling stories. “I wasn’t very good at sports,” recalls Oz. “I wasn’t very good-looking. I wasn’t very good in the classroom. So telling stories was my way to impress the girls.” He’s not sure just how impressed the girls were, but in continuing to tell those stories he grew up to become Israel’s foremost writer.
When Oz was 13 years old, his mother committed suicide, an event that had a profound effect on him and his later novels. Much of what he wrote, he says, was an attempt to decipher why she killed herself and to resume the conversation with her that had been so abruptly interrupted even before it began. Her suicide forced him to change directions.
Before, he had been, in his words, a “chauvinistic, nationalistic poet.” After her death, he became immensely curious about people, women, and especially families. The family, he observes, became the most important element in his writing. Endlessly fascinated by the institution, he believes that it has no busihile writing a book, Amos Oz rises each morning at 5 a.m., gets dressed, then leaves his home on a sleepy suburban street in A rad, a small town in the mountains between Beersheba and the Dead Sea, to take a brisk 30-minute walk through the desert near his home. As he walks, he repeats out loud the dialogue he has written the day before. “I need to hear my characters speak, their voice, their accent,” Oz, Israel’s most successful writer, tells The Jerusalem Report.
“Writing is a musical work no less than it is a literary work.”
Just turned 73, the Jerusalem-born author has led a split life. H e has created acclaimed literary works including My Michael (1968), The Hill of Evil Counsel (1976) and The Land of Israel (1983) that many say provide the most sensitive portraits ever penned of Israeli life.
The New York Times called My Michael “one of the most accomplished foreign novels to appear here in the last few years.”
At the same time, he has also served as a self-described “political guerilla,” petitioning right-wing politicians to soften their views.
Of late, Oz assails the government less, but he admits that he is incapable of slowing down his writing, despite having authored 27 works that have been translated into 40 languages.
W hen writing his last few books, he has vowed to himself that each one would be his last. But then new characters arouse his imagination and he returns to his desk.
His latest book, Between Friends, a collection of short stories about Israeli kibbutz life, became an instant Israeli bestseller. An English-language version is on the way. Oz continues to teach Modern Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba.
How does he know whether to write a novel or speak out publicly to try to change government policy? “Each time I agree with myself 100 percent, I don’t write a novel. I write an angry article telling the government to go to hell. Each time I find myself in a slight disagreement with myself – in other words I hear more than one view – then at least I know I am pregnant with a story,” he says.
He keeps two ballpoint pens on his desk. He uses one to tell the government to go to hell, the other to tell stories.
All his life he has been surrounded by books, heavily influenced by them, entranced with their texture, scent, and content. As a boy of 5, he learned to type and precociously described himself as a writer. At 7, he was so enamored of books that he wished he could literally grow up to be one – for personal safety.
“There was,” he recalls, “a strong feeling in Jerusalem that we are all going to be killed in a second Holocaust. So I thought it was safer to grow up as a book.”
To this day, he spends most of his waking hours each day in a book-filled basement study at his home, alternating between sitting on a desk chair and standing behind a lectern to ease the chronic back pain that increases the more he sits.
He did not grow up to become a book. But even as a student he loved telling stories. “I wasn’t very good at sports,” recalls Oz. “I wasn’t very good-looking. I wasn’t very good in the classroom. So telling stories was my way to impress the girls.” He’s not sure just how impressed the girls were, but in continuing to tell those stories he grew up to become Israel’s foremost writer.
When Oz was 13 years old, his mother committed suicide, an event that had a profound effect on him and his later novels. Much of what he wrote, he says, was an attempt to decipher why she killed herself and to resume the conversation with her that had been so abruptly interrupted even before it began. Her suicide forced him to change directions.
Before, he had been, in his words, a “chauvinistic, nationalistic poet.” After her death, he became immensely curious about people, women, and especially families. The family, he observes, became the most important element in his writing. Endlessly fascinated by the institution, he believes that it has no business existing, as so many people have rejected it. “So many ideologies and religions have tried to demolish the family, yet it seems to be alive and kicking.”
After a Jerusalem childhood, life at nearby Kibbutz Hulda, a three-year stint in the Israeli army, and university studies in literature and philosophy, Oz wound up in 1986 in the desert town of Arad, hoping that the climate would help his then 7-year-old son Daniel’s severe asthma. By the spring of 2012, now fully recovered and a poet/musician, Daniel had moved to Tel Aviv. “But his old parents,” says Oz, “have stayed in Arad because they like the desert.” Oz and his wife Nily have two other children, Fania, 52, and Gaia, 48, and four grandchildren. Oz and Fania collaborated on a book called Jews and Words scheduled to be published in English in November 2012.
The desert retains a mesmerizing hold on Amos Oz. He calls it the “great humbler,” keeping everything in proportion. When he returns from his early morning walk and turns on the radio news, listening to politicians say “never” or “forever,” Oz cringes, knowing that in the Middle East never is between six months and three years. “I know that the stones out there in the desert are laughing at the politicians,” he says.
Rigid discipline
While the stones laugh, Oz shuts out most major distractions in order to keep focused on his burgeoning characters and his writing.
He hardly uses email. He does not browse the Internet. Each day he watches one television program (the main evening Channel 1 news) and reads one newspaper, Haaretz. At times he disconnects his phone.
Oz practices the same rigid discipline in learning about his characters and how they interact with one another: “I keep them inside myself for a long time before I start writing because I have to see what those characters do to each other, which is the plot.”
He does not aim at turning out a specific number of words per day. At times, he might write a single sentence, at other times a few paragraphs. Using longhand, his contemplation and writing sometimes consume 15 hours a day. He breaks up the writing with an afternoon nap. “After the siesta,” he notes, “I again go down to this basement study to destroy all that I wrote in the morning.”
In earlier years at the kibbutz, he used to feel guilty that others were engaging in hard work, milking cows or plowing the fields, while he had written a mere three sentences that day, sometimes scratching out two of them. The guilt has evaporated. Putting together as many as 15 drafts these days, Oz lays the different versions on his desk, “cutting and pasting” the best parts into a final handwritten text. Then, relying on his two index fingers on a computer keyboard, he hunts and pecks his way through three weeks of typing a more or less final draft.
Because he writes in solitude in the desert and dwells on universal themes, some describe Oz as a modern-day Biblical prophet.
He is, however, a diehard secularist. Religion plays almost no role in his household. He does not visit a synagogue and describes himself as an agnostic. For Passover, Oz and his family hold a “lighthearted” Seder, using a Haggada from Kibbutz Hulda.
For Oz, the Bible bears an importance – but as a historical document, not as a guide on how to become closer to God. He identifies himself as a Jew and an Israeli, noting that Judaism for him is a civilization, but not a religion.
Among his best-known works in recent years is his 2004 book, A Tale of Love and Darkness. While his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, had insisted on describing the book as a memoir, Oz resisted but eventually gave in, regretting the concession.
He had deliberately used the word “Tale” in the title, knowing that he had invented some of what he had written.
“Not everything that I wrote in A Tale of Love and Darkness is a recording,” says Oz. “Some of it is a reconstruction, an invention. A tale is everything: fantasy, invention, nightmares, dreams, thinking and recollections.”
For example, knowing that he could not ask his grandfather what he said to Oz’s grandmother in bed – “I’d get slapped in the face” – the author simply imagined the dialogue.
Suggesting that his novels can and should have the same degree of truthfulness that nonfiction has, Oz makes clear that he dislikes anyone calling his own novels “fiction.”
I much prefer the Hebrew word siporet (“narrative prose”) to the English word ‘fiction’ which means ‘lie.’ I would like to be remembered as a writer of siporet, not as a writer of fiction.”
Politics of characters
 As part of his ability to compartmentalize, a function of his extreme discipline, Oz is careful to keep his novels free of his personal attitudes on Israeli politics: While his characters have political views, Oz refuses to exploit his novels to advance his own political agenda. “I never wrote a novel to persuade my readers to vote one way and not another way. I never wrote a novel to tell Israel to get out of the occupied territories.”
The politics of his characters, he stresses, are not necessarily his personal politics.
For instance, he notes, in his novel Black Box (1986) one character is an Orthodox Jew, an enthusiast of Greater Israel, “obviously contrary to my politics. I gave him a fair hearing, a fair voice. I didn’t distort his opinions. I made him as convincing as I could possibly make him.”
Distressed that no solution appears in sight for the seemingly never-ending Israeli- Palestinian conflict, Oz remains slightly hopeful if only because he believes that in time both sides through sheer exhaustion will find a way out of their impasse. He was among the first to advocate a two-state solution soon after the 1967 Six Day War, a Palestinian state side by side with the State of Israel.
How will the conflict end? He knows it will not be by one side becoming convinced that the other is right, not in a Dostoyevskian embrace. It will end, he predicts, when both sides become weary of the conflict.
The same holds true, he says, of personal conflicts, including between husbands and wives. “Problems don’t get solved. They fade away through fatigue and exhaustion.”
Despite the slow pace of progress toward peace, Oz describes himself as an “optimist but with no timetable for my optimism.” That hope derives from what he calls a “new reality,” now accepted by most Israelis and Palestinians, that ultimately a Palestinian state will emerge and live in peace with the State of Israel.
What is taking so long? “The patient, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is reluctantly ready for the surgery but the doctors are cowards,” Oz says sorrowfully. Widening the chasm between the parties is a tiny group in each camp. “I never underestimate the power and the determination of the fanatics on both sides to derail any compromise,” he sighs.
While the politicians tarry and the fanatics hold sway, Oz continues to mumble on the streets of A rad, the stones in the desert keep on laughing, and a secular desert prophet churns out Israel’s finest prose.


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