Amos Oz is an Israeli writer born in 1939 as the only son of educated European Jews Yehuda and Fania, who narrowly escaped the Holocaust. Father was reading in sixteen languages, mother in eight. But in the new world life was hard. The father had no chance to get a teaching post at the Hebrew University because at a time the number of experts in literature in Jerusalem greatly outnumbered the number of students.
They lived in a tiny thirty square meters apartment with low ceilings and dreamed of a better future for their son. Fania never get used to Jerusalem and the fact that she had dimmed her own ambitions. She took away her life when Amos was only twelve years old, after long struggling with depression.
The death of his mother was not a subject that he could talk about with his father. The range of emotions: sadness, anger, hatred, nostalgia, loss of love with which he wrestled all his life are topics of the novel “A Tale of Love and Darkness”.
Rarely the reader finds a book that is larger than life. Even after thousands of books we read, even if we enjoy most of them, there are just a few times that we read truly a great book. “A Tale of Love and Darkness” is without the doubt one of those books.
In search of the roots of his family tragedy Amos Oz speaks from the perspective of an intelligent and somewhat spoiled boy. The book is very personal – he talks about relationships in between family, about growing up and living in a times of great political changes, but also relations among friends, neighbors and acquaintances, including many real life characters. Giants of literature and politics intertwine in “Tale of Love and Darkness” making unique and complex mixture, and Amos Oz reasserts himself as a true wizard of language and storytelling.
Amos Oz is a strong supporter of a peaceful solution of the Arab-Jewish conflict and one of the founders of the legendary movement Peace Now. For many years he was defending the idea of two states and the Palestinian people right to return to Gaza and the West Bank. He often speaks of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs conflict to the general public. His views are always cosmopolitan and in a search of a peaceful solution. “This is a tragedy, not a movie with a good guys and a bad guys. This is a tragedy because it is a conflict of right and proper. None of them have nowhere to go. This conflict is a conflict of the victims, both have right to demand the right to the same piece of the land. Most of people know that there is no alternative to the idea of two states and that this will eventually happen. I love Israel, but I don’t like it very much. I love it because of the argumentativeness, because every staircase in Israel is full of memories and stories and conflicting ideas. But I resent the politics, the occupation, the oppression of the Palestinian people and the deterioration in civil rights standards.”
And when he sees a window with a light on, late at night, he still finds himself imagining what’s keeping that person up. And, just like that, a story begins.
