By Maya Sela
Amos Oz is first mentioned in Haaretz in October 1961: “Preparations continue for the publication of a weekly political newspaper by very young members of [Labor Party precursor] Mapai belonging to a group that intends to formulate new ideology. The editorial offices are to be located in Jerusalem, managed by a small number of staff consisting of three to four members of the group. The candidate for deputy editor is Mr. Amos Oz of Kibbutz Hulda.”
The next mention is from June 1965. It’s quite short, announcing the appearance of Oz’s first book, “Where the Jackals Howl”: “The collection, containing nine stories, with kibbutz life in the background of several, is the first for the 25-year-old writer, a native of Jerusalem, a member of Kibbutz Hulda and a teacher in the high school there. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University.”
Oz was born in Jerusalem on May 4, 1939; we meet in the run-up to his 70th birthday. A number of celebrations marking this milestone are in preparation, the largest being a three-day festival in Arad that will include literary, musical and other cultural events. Major Israeli artists will take part and President Shimon Peres will be at opening night. In mid-May, Ben-Gurion University is hosting a conference in Oz’s honor, including an exhibition, “Linguistic Geography.”
When I show Oz the 1961 newspaper clipping, he reads it carefully in silence. “Truly moving,” he says. “It was a major revolt against David Ben-Gurion – a smashing of idols.”
In an interview with Haaretz’s Ari Shavit in 1990, Oz said: “I’m always somewhat remote from everything I do. Everything. In politics, society, the family. I cannot and perhaps also do not want to give 100 percent of myself to anything. Sometimes I give 80 percent, 90 percent, but never 100 … so there’s always a part of me that’s uninvolved, that sits on the sidelines and observes. Sometimes it looks on from the distance, almost hostile. Very chilly.”
He is wary about giving interviews, saying he is tired of them, and after he marks the boundaries (brief, not sweeping in scope), he chooses a cafe called Marilyn Monroe in north Tel Aviv, near the apartment to which Oz and his wife travel from Arad every weekend to visit their children and grandchildren. The cafe is at one end of a shopping center and sparsely attended during our morning meeting. At some point he interrupts, saying I should drink my coffee, “so it won’t get cold,” and I can’t tell if he’s really concerned or telling me to be quiet. When I put two voice recorders on the table, explaining I need a backup in case one doesn’t work, he says he hopes they’ll both have the same version.
Eccentrics and misfits
What kind of a young man were you?
“I was a kibbutznik who wrote short stories at night. Here and there I wrote political articles, mainly against Ben-Gurion, against the cult of personality and officialdom. Those were the first things I published.”
Did you hope to be discovered?
“I wrote because I had to; I’ve written since I was a small child. First I wrote all kinds of enthusiastic, patriotic poems. Later I began to write short stories. My most recent book, ‘Scenes from a Village Life,’ completes the circle, because I’ve returned to the form after a hiatus of many, many years. The first stories I wrote were published in ‘Where the Jackals Howl’; before that some had appeared in Aharon Amir’s magazine Keshet. My stories were unusual in the literary landscape because most of those ones that had seen print until then were by members of the [pre-state] Palmach generation, stories of and about the collective. The stories I wrote took place inside the collective, on the kibbutz, but they weren’t stories of the collective; they were stories of eccentrics and misfits, and back then I was asked the same question I’m asked today about my most recent book: ‘Who does it represent and reflect?’ I said then exactly what I say now: ‘It’s not a representation of anything, not a reflection.'”
You’re always expected to have something to say about the political situation.
“Look, if I write a story about a father, a mother, a daughter and an allowance, someone will say the father is the government, the mother is the public, the daughter is the younger generation and the allowance is the economic crisis. What can I do? The new book takes place in Israel more or less, but it’s more about the human situation than the Israeli one. I know that people read the Israeli situation into it, because the Israeli situation is so painful that people read it into everything. I can’t tell people how to read.”
This most recent collection of Oz’s stories was published in Israel in February. Each story but the last takes place in Tel Ilan, an imaginary village. The book is filled with a feeling of loss, twilight, ending. The end of people’s lives, of places, dying dreams, old houses being sold off to real estate sharks, old people who hear voices undermining the dreams of their youth, disappointed loves and ghosts under marriage beds.
It’s a very bitter book, a despairing one. Do you think your age has something to do with this?
“I don’t believe this is a book I could have written 10 or 20 years ago. Obviously it was written by a mature person and not a young one, but that doesn’t say much because not every older person has written this book. I’m always reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre, who, when asked why he was a Marxist about everything but literature, where he had built his own private space, said, ‘Because Marxism has a very good explanation why [poet]Paul Valery was the product of the French bourgeoisie, and why even his expensive furniture was petit bourgeois, but it does not explain why not every member of the French petit bourgeoisie can write the poems of Paul Valery.’ It’s a question that interests me, and to connect this book to a certain age is certainly correct, but not enough.”
Do you feel 70 years old?
“Of course, I’ve been around a long time. Being a 70-year-old Israeli is probably like being a 200-year-old Swede, because I’ve seen so much, seen everything. I was born before the state, and I remember the days before the state and the first days of the state and the first years. It’s a good business to be an Israeli, a tough life, but for the price of an ordinary one you live 200 years.”
Aging doesn’t make you angry?
“I’m at one with the process because I know its time has come. I’ve really been around a long time, so I’m aging in peace. I’m not angry about it. Of course it’s tough that all sorts of things I used to be able to do I can’t do anymore, and all sorts of things I wanted to do I don’t want to do anymore, but I live with this and accept it because age has its advantages. It’s a tranquil age; I look at things more tranquilly than I did 20 or 30 years ago.”
What about the betrayal of the body and fear of death?
“I was always afraid of death – it’s nothing new. I was afraid of death when I was young, too.”
And loneliness?
“I have the same loneliness as everyone else, the fundamental loneliness of the human condition, but I’m surrounded by a loving family, so I can’t say about myself that I’m lonely. I haven’t got any complaints.”
The book you wrote is depressing.
“This book is about people who’ve lost something and they go searching for it; in fact, they search for something they’ve kept hidden from themselves. In the basement, the crawl space above the ceiling, in some suitcase, a backyard, they’re looking for it. Sometimes they find it, or not, but they look. By virtue of acting, because they search, their actions are not desperate. Desperate people do not look feverishly for what they have lost. In nearly every story, someone is looking energetically, in a state of agitation, for something lost.”
Writes with a pen
In the story that ends the book, “A Far-Off Place in Another Time,” people live out a nightmarish existence in some ailing region. Oz describes “the sweetish smell of decay that permeates our huts” and “the stench of corpses arising from the living, too.” He gives the reason that “so many here are cripples, with enlarged goiters, or mentally handicapped, deformed of limb and face, drooling, because everyone here breeds with everyone: brother with sister. Son with mother. Fathers with their daughters.”
And you’re trying to tell me I shouldn’t turn this story into an allegory for our situation?
“Don’t bother, because the story does not reflect what I think about the Israeli situation. What I think about the situation is that it’s open-ended; it can end well or badly, largely depending on what we do and what we decide. It’s preferable in my eyes to the classic situation of Jews in the Diaspora, whose future does not depend on them but on others. A big disaster can take place here, certainly, we’re not immune, but if one does, at least it will be one we brought on ourselves and not one caused by others.”
The Amos Oz I’m meeting now is different from the one I met when I read the book.
“Beware of such liaisons.”
Are you a contented person?
“I’m a grateful person.”
When I read the book I thought you were in despair. Apparently it’s my despair and not yours.
“Yes. Interview yourself, ask yourself the questions and write the answers.”
In “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” Oz gives advice to the good reader and heaps scorn on the bad one, and on the flattering interviewer ever searching for “the sour, self-righteous satisfactions sold to the consumers of scandals and ‘revelations’ according to the menu dished up by cheap tabloids.”
I ask about Arad. About a daily schedule. About writing habits.
“I get up at 5 in the morning, every day, winter and summer, without an alarm clock. This habit from the kibbutz has stayed with me, but it’s also biological – I’m a morning person. I go out to walk a little in the desert near the house in Arad, not long, 20 minutes, half an hour, as much as I can, and return to drink coffee and glance at the paper. By 6, I’m already sitting at my desk and I write until noon. In the afternoon I eat and read a bit, and go back to my basement to erase what I wrote in the morning.”
What are you writing now?
“I’m writing my next book, but don’t ask what it is because I won’t tell you.”
Do you know?
“I know what I’ll do today, tomorrow and the next day; what will come out of it at the end I think I know, but there are always surprises.”
How much time will it take?
“How should I know? I haven’t signed any contract with myself.”
Do you use a computer?
“I always write with a pen. I have a computer nearby, on the side, and when I’ve finished writing many drafts, I type very slowly with two fingers because I don’t know how to touch-type. I type myself because no one else can read my handwriting. But I always write with a pen for sensual reasons, the arc between the pen and fingers, and the paper, the erasures and scribbles. You can’t do that on a computer.”
To whom do you show the drafts? Who comments on them?
“I show them to the children, to my wife and two other friends.”
Do they dare make comments?
“Yes, they do, and I usually don’t listen. Only sometimes when they point something out and I suddenly realize myself it doesn’t belong. But if I don’t see it their way, I leave it in.”
At the age of 15, Oz moved to Kibbutz Hulda, where he married Nily, a kibbutz member. It’s also where his three children were born. His youngest child suffers from asthma so they left the kibbutz to live in Arad. While his son has long since moved to Tel Aviv, Oz remains in Arad.
“We stay in Arad because it’s good for us there,” he says.
What’s so good about Arad?
“First of all, I love the desert, I love to wake up in the morning and go out to the desert. Second, it’s a quiet place, five or six friends, I don’t need more than that. When I visited New York, I knew I was missing 200 interesting events every night. When I’m in Tel Aviv, I know I’m missing 20. In Arad I miss out on just two.”
If that were the plot of a story of yours, one might say it was an allegory about someone who was stifled on a kibbutz and escaped to a place where he could breathe.
“I already told you that people see everything I write is an allegory. If I write about Amos and Maya drinking coffee they’ll say it’s Syrian President Bashar Assad and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conducting peace negotiations.”
I’m Assad in this story?
“I don’t know which one is Assad, but that’s what they’ll say.” He laughs.
Many articles about Oz in the archive describe women arriving in droves at literary events where he participates. Oz was never just an author but a rather good-looking one, the ultimate native Israeli with smiling eyes and a shock of hair falling over his forehead.
“It matters to me very much that people like what I write; it really matters and gives me a lot of satisfaction. But if someone in a cafe recognizes my face because they saw me on television, on television they only notice the sweater and not me. I could go on television and say I plan to commit suicide at the Azrieli Towers, and people will watch the interview and say, ‘you wore a nice sweater,’ or ‘that sweater wasn’t so nice.’ That’s how it is. People in Israel are very, very direct. Once, when I was in Acre with my family, someone came up to me and said, ‘I know you, don’t tell me who you are.’ So I didn’t say anything. Then he said, ‘You’re the writer A.B. Yehoshua.’ I told him no. Then he asked, ‘Are you sure?'”
The two of us laugh and he asks me to turn off the recorders. The interview, he says politely, is over, only 40 minutes since we sat down. He explains that he’s given too many interviews recently and it’s hard on him.
Does it bore you?
“No, it’s simply more comfortable for me to sit down and talk with someone about literature or politics or life than to sit down and talk about myself. You wouldn’t feel comfortable either if people started asking you questions about yourself, where you come from, how you feel, why you live where you do, what you do all day.”
A copy of his most recent book, my copy, lies on the table. He asks to see the parts I’ve underlined, leafing through the pages with interest and saying he’s learned a lot about me. But he won’t say what.