Nathan Shachar: Amos Oz opened the door to a new Hebrew own resonant style of fiction

Door

december 30, 2018

In a way similar to Amos Oz life’s work of Strindberg. It had been a novelist in the Swedish and israeli literature before them, but it was they who laid the foundations of a modern national own resonant style of fiction where the people in the books sounded like they could do in reality.

As He let the swedes out of all the classes in the culture, and with them the vital everyday language, so opened the Oz door to a new Hebrew own resonant style of fiction, populated by new actors, who spoke the country’s living languages.

the important Hebrew writers before Amos Oz. The nobel prize winner, shmuel tamir Agnon, Oz got to know that small and admired very much, was one of them. But the Hebrew literature grundargeneration had one leg in the old world bildningskultur and idébrytningar, in the jewish eastern europe, in the Talmud, in a world which was doomed to disappear before it disappeared physically.

When they spoke Hebrew, it sounded like books. The difference, in psychology and experience, between those who created Israel and who became the first native israelis, was that the difference between the two people. They lived in a world and spoke – almost – a-language. The big book of the existential contrast between these two människoarter is Oz’s autobiography, “A tale of love and darkness”.

in the old world and broke out of it in an almost violent way. The home was a continuation of the intellectual world in Odessa and the other cities, where parents and large house joie de vivre has taken shape. His mother killed herself when he was twelve, a trauma he only late in life could approach the literary. When he was fifteen years old, he left home in Jerusalem and moved to a kibbutz. ”Why not to Tel Aviv, would it not have been easier?” asked someone once during a press conference with him.

” It was not radical enough. I needed a total break. Away from it all. At home, we were antisocialister, now I went into a collective. I turned back to my borgerlige librarian to the father, and went loose on the clods with the hoe, and shovel.

was a poverty-stricken and chaotic society, but it was in a sense straightforward. It had succeeded, now it was to hang in and not let go. Everything depended on the israelis themselves, the big question was whether they would unlikely be able to stand against the external enemy. Oz was one of the first who understood that the war in 1967 begun the game on the right.

Israel’s future was now linked with the palestinians, and the key to surviving was no longer it’s own power. The challenge had been to defeat the arabs, now was the challenge to get along with them. This imperative went as a red thread through the entire Oz public deed and left him no rest.

In his genombrottsroman “My Michael” (1968) will be in the shared Jerusalem, an allegory of the difficult and symbolic ‘ relationship to the arabs. The young lekskolefröken Hanna, on the way to losing the understanding of the dull routine and heavy duties, dreaming – or daydreaming – about the arab twins Khalil and Aziz, who she played with in childhood. The arab is at once a demonic enemy and mäkligt enticing. No one had hitherto approached the subject in such a bold and subtle way.

as he once impatiently fled, ended up after care in a different light. He regretted that he, despite his multilingual parents had grown up as monolingual, in a country and in a world which in some ways was a blank slate, in a story that has just made its beginning.

He used to say about the jiddishtalande the world, in eastern europe, they were europeans and not nationalists – in a Europe where the nationalists became more and more europeans are becoming fewer and fewer. The jews were to the last, the only europeans, despite the fact that they met all the nationalism criteria: one people, one language and one faith: ”the only thing they lacked were tanks, and it was their destiny”.

Amos Oz played, together with his almost equally famous colleagues in the romangebitet David Grossman and A. B. Yehoshua, a role that it is difficult to find parallels in other countries. As soon as they manifests themselves, it automatically becomes the headlines and debate, and not rarely responds to the governments of their criticism with the communiqués and denials.

the solutions, and the compromises, the authors recommended are no longer relevant. The last times DN met Oz, it was not possible to make an error in his agony, not to say despair, over how accurate his prophesies proved.

Amos Oz was not a ”post-zionist”; he did not consider that the conflict made the original program is obsolete, and he turned with force against the idea that jews and palestinians would establish a common state. In a DN interview in October he said that Israel’s worst enemy is no longer outside of the country, but in its management:

our rulers are now trying to do is to be intimidated and encounter out the ones that say the opposite. That is not 100% with us is against us, yes even the traitor. People hear this daily, in tv, in the press; they hear their leaders speak, and gradually get the impression that that is what you are discussing: Either you with me or you are my enemy! It is very dangerous.