|
Starred Review. This memoir/family history brims
over with riches: metaphors and poetry, drama and comedy, failure and
success, unhappy marriages and a wealth of idiosyncratic characters. Some
are lions of the Zionist movement-David Ben-Gurion (before whom a young Oz
made a terrifying command appearance), novelist S.Y. Agnon, poet Saul
Tchernikhovsky-others just neighbors and family friends, all painted
lovingly and with humor.
Though set mostly during the author's
childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940s and '50s, the tale is epic in scope,
following his ancestors back to Odessa and to Rovno in 19th-century
Ukraine, and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove
them with their families to Palestine in the early 1930s. In a rough,
dusty, lower-middle-class suburb of Jerusalem, both of Oz's parents found
mainly disappointment: his father, a scholar, failed to attain the
academic distinction of his uncle, the noted historian Joseph Klausner.
Oz's beautiful, tender mother, after a long depresson, committed suicide
when Oz (born in 1939) was 12.
By the age of 14, Oz was ready to
flee his book-crammed, dreary, claustrophobic flat for the freedom and
outdoor life of Kibbutz Hulda. Oz's personal trajectory is set against the
background of an embattled Palestine during WWII, the jubilation after the
U.N. vote to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the violence
and deprivations of Israel's war of independence and the months-long Arab
siege of Jerusalem. This is a powerful, nimbly constructed saga of a man,
a family and a nation forged in the crucible of a difficult, painful
history. |
