A story of love and darkness by Amos Oz

In A Tale Of Love And Darkness, Amos Oz writes an autobiography of his early years. Although written from a much later perspective, this memoir lives on in its entirety in the first years of the author’s life, spanning from birth to the age of twelve, when his mother died in 1952. There is also much in the book which is drawn from his adolescence. and her job on a kibbutz after leaving home, but these remain as visions of a future only partially real when the narrative returns, often abruptly to those years before her when her mother was still alive. There are detailed stories of schooling, the discovery of literature, and a bit of her coming of age and her early adult life experiences of love and affection. There is much more about his father and his only partially successful life as a writer and scholar, plus a few other things for which he displayed an equally unknown talent. There is also a large part of Jewish history, especially that relating to the post-WWII diaspora from Europe to British-controlled Palestine.

But at its core, this book is essentially about the relationship between Amos Oz and his mother. It begins with her giving birth to him and ends with her death, just twelve years later, a fact that left the author with deep feelings of guilt and loss, of course. But there is more, in that it is also felt that there has been a lasting psychological scar that has marked much of the author’s work.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness succeeds in many ways, too many for a cursory review like this to list, let alone describe. His description of family life in the 1940s in Jerusalem should top the list. This was not an unpredictable, noisy home. The father was a book lover, a man who yearned to be an academic, to feel the social respect that would be conferred upon him by authorship and recognition. Amos Oz talks a lot about his father’s unrecognized talent and, one feels, the son was perhaps prouder than the father when the latter finally earned his Ph.D. from the University of London. Both had passed long before then.

Despite the book’s vivid description of his own family and that of his relatives, Amos Oz seems almost paralyzed in the middle of a sentence when he describes his mother. She was clearly an immense, if quite distant, influence on him. She had domestic leanings, was very attractive, perhaps distant, and certainly long-suffering, as her husband pursued his private dreams in his even more private study among his books and papers. She was probably not alone in this situation, but perhaps more alone than she or especially others were willing to admit.

The origins of these families were in the Baltic states, Poland, Russia, and other parts of Europe. They set out for Palestine, pushed by the hardened fist of fascism and, elsewhere, by sheer intolerance. Most of those who remained perished. They were greeted by a British administration in the Middle East that was never clear on its priorities and where politics was done on the roof. It seems that there are not many changes. Calls for Jewish statehood were carried out alongside direct action and this era of stress and deprivation forms the backdrop to the early years of the author’s life. At eighteen, he would eventually meet Ben-Gurion, an encounter where nervous tension, pride, and wonder jump off the page only to quickly evaporate.

Amos Oz had relatives who were writers and scholars, but they generally did not use their influence to further his father’s ambitions, although this did not seem to create tension. His father’s stoicism probably would not have tolerated comments. However, the language was always at the center of the home, and his father’s command of Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, Lithuanian, and Russian allowed the etymology to become the breakfast talk.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness is especially memorable for its depiction of the author’s upbringing. He attended all kinds of establishments, private and public, with both face-to-face and personal settings. He falls in love with a teacher and is later brought up on purpose by another. It becomes an experience powerful enough to live a lifetime.

Ultimately, Amos Oz decided to adopt kibbutz life. This seems to be a surprise, as we believe that Amos has his family. But he accepts the new challenges and seems to enjoy the openness of physical labor. Perhaps it was a psychological reaction to the fact that his father’s rather withdrawn fondness for books might have alienated his mother in the house. This is something that is alluded to in the book, but only through the views of the author’s family member. You are certainly not stressed. But through kibbutz life, Amos Oz learns that the most effective way to become a writer is to live life and observe it. The writer can then interpret it.

But here too there is darkness, a personal darkness that the author regularly alludes to and then quickly avoids. We believe that surely it is the memory of the death of his mother that is resurfacing. If there is guilt involved, then its origin is surely the perceived inability to influence events, to go back and change the circumstances that led to the tragedy. If only …

In the last pages, the author is only twelve years old again. Observe how his mother falls into the dream that is the end of his life, a memory relived from the distance of middle age, but the memory remains as alive as the day it happened, illustrating that a dream silence, when eternal, is more powerful than any word can describe.