MEMOIR
Personal and political
NILANJANA S. ROY
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A moving evocation of the troubled birth of a beleaguered nation and the tentative adolescence of a great writer.
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A Tale of Love and Darkness; Amos Oz, Vintage Books, distributed by Rupa & Co, £4.75.
"My mother's stories may have been strange, frightening, but they were captivating... Her stories did not begin at the beginning or conclude with a happy ending but they flickered in the half-light, wound round themselves, emerged from the mists for a moment, amazed you, sent shivers up your spine, then disappeared back into the darkness before you had time to see what was in front of your eyes."
AMOS OZ was a child of 12-and-a-half, caught between the arid repressiveness of his parents' corner of Jerusalem and the turbulence that accompanied the emergence of the Israeli state, when his mother killed herself. By that time, she had told him stories of a kind few mothers tell their children: of Hades and Orpheus, of the daughter whose Nazi father was hanged at Nuremberg, of the bear who adopted a dead child, of the ghost who returned from the dead to seduce his murderer's daughter. His father, Yehuda Arieh Klausner, stocked their tiny flat with books, but it was his mother, Fania Mussman, who gave him the old archetypes, the dark ancient tales and the bleak modern ones that he built on to become one of the world's greatest living storytellers.
Saga of promise and betrayal
To say that Fania Mussman's suicide is at the heart of A Tale of Love and Darkness would be misleading; it is there right from the start and the knowledge of her death goes hand in hand with the saga of promise and betrayal, blood and destruction, that accompanies the story of modern Israel. Two years after her suicide, writes Oz, "I killed my father and the whole of Jerusalem." The boy who at the age of five had printed up a sign reading AMOS KLAUSNER WRITER accomplished this by changing his name to Oz and joining a kibbutz.
Klausner died forever; the writer remained. It takes several readings of A Tale of Love and Darkness before the power of this dense, searingly honest memoir reveals itself, before the glory of this master craftsman's prose becomes fully apparent.
His history moves between the personal and the political; there could be no other way. Fania Mussman and Yehuda Klausner had friends and family die in the Holocaust; their life in Jerusalem was built on the foundations of a repeating pattern of family migrations, as the Jews of Europe found the doors of the world closed against them. A young Amos Oz learns the meaning of "anti-Semitism" through photographs taken in his father's school and college years. "The boys are wearing caps and the girls round berets... It's almost certain that virtually all the young people in these group photographs were stripped naked and made to run, whipped and chased by dogs, starved and frozen, into the large pits in the Ponar Forest. Which of them survived, apart from my father?"
In the last years of British rule, Jerusalem's residents faced "explosions, ambushes, arrests, house-to-house searches, stifled dread of what still awaited us in the days to come". The phrases of ordinary conversation were ominous: "Chelmo, Nazis, Vilna, partisans, Aktionen, death camps, death trains". Oz learned that children of his age didn't always grow up; he learned enough to want to grow up to be a book. "Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear... . Books are not difficult to burn either, it's true, but if I grew up to be a book there was a good chance that at least one copy might manage to survive... "
And he did. Oz tells the stories of darkness as only a survivor can; and he writes with a survivor's intensity about love— the love of books, of Teacher Zelda, of young women, of a pet tortoise, of the comedy that ensues when Menachem Begin uses the old Hebrew word for "to arm", which in the slang of Oz's day corresponded to the term for the male member.
A Tale of Love and Darkness is a colossal achievement. It will stand as one of the great books of our time, a moving evocation of the troubled birth of a beleaguered nation and the tentative adolescence of a great writer. As it spirals downwards to its terrible, poignant conclusion, the son using all the power and pity of a writer's imagination to evoke his mother's last moments of life, you know that you will never forget this book, or Amos Oz.
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