Israel’s best known writer, Amos Oz, has fought a large part of his life for a peace with the Palestinians – but ultimately in vain. The author was a figurehead of the peace movement in his country. At the age of 79 years, the world-renowned, award-winning author (“A tale of love and darkness”) died.
The Israeli President Reuven Rivlin expressed on Friday sorrow over his death and paid tribute to him as a “literary giant”. Rivlin said: “rest in peace, our beloved Amos.”
The Israeli peace movement was only a shadow of its former self, while the settlers ‘ movement gained more and more support from the government and the army. Oz gave a peace settlement but in spite of all the setbacks inevitable and only a matter of time.
“The Palestinians are not going anywhere, and the Israelis will remain here,” he said. “Both sides have no choice, you have to divide the house into two apartments, as the Czechs and the Slovaks have done. How long will it take, I can not say.” He will no longer be a part of it now.
trauma as a core theme
Oz came out in 1939 under the name of Amos Klausner in Jerusalem as the son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine to the world. In its highly educated, right-wing Zionist family, he grew up surrounded by books. His parents were active in literary circles of the then intellectual Elite of Jerusalem, his uncle was a scholar, Joseph Klausner, in his house of Oz as a child and went out.
As a young man, Oz, was also familiar with the major Hebrew writer Samuel Joseph Agnon, received in 1966, as the first and so far only Israeli Nobel prize for literature. With the Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, he went to school.
Personal and national trauma are Central themes in the literary work of Oz, the witnessed as a twelve-year-old and the suicide of his mother. The severe vibration that shaped his life profoundly, he described in his autobiographical novel “A tale of love and darkness”.
Several prizes
Three years after the death of his mother, he moved to kibbutz Chulda and his family changed name from Klausner to Oz, which in Hebrew means strength. He had rebelled, and with the name change symbolically, his father killed, wrote to Oz later, “on the rubble to build a new life”.
his first stories and the book “Among friends” based on his experiences with life in the collective settlement. Oz studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, literature, and philosophy. Since then, he has written numerous novels and short stories and has been awarded a number of prizes, including the peace prize of the German book trade (1992), the Siegfried Unseld prize (2010) and the Franz Kafka prize (2013). Well-known works of Oz are about “My Michael,” “The perfect peace”, a “Black Box”, “another place” and “A woman”.
No Man
The married father of three children and multiple Grand-father was mentioned time and again for the Nobel prize for literature, but never excellent. In his novel “Judas” (2015) Oz, who spent his last years in Tel Aviv, with the theme of betrayal.
He was a peace activist, but not an unrealistic pacifist, emphasized Oz. According to the author, who himself fought in a tank unit in the six-day war in 1967 and in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 supported, in the summer of 2014 the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza strip. (sda)
Created: 28.12.2018, 15:23 PM
