They don’t make them like this anymore. Literally Israelis like Amos Oz are fading from the scene. The book reads like a coming of age tale. In realitThey don’t make them like this anymore. Literally Israelis like Amos Oz are fading from the scene. The book reads like a coming of age tale. In reality Oz is telling the story of his childhood in Jerusalem's Kerem Avraham neighborhood in the 1940s. It’s also a bridge between the Old World and the contemporary world we live in now.
Oz's storytelling is layered and often nonlinear. By way of backstory Oz recounts his parents and grandparents immigration from pre-war Eastern Europe to Israel during the British mandate. His family was rich in personalities if not worldly riches.
The family story circles around his mother's suicide at age 38. The family dynamics inside Oz's childhood home are somewhat Freudian. His father is overbearing and frustrated professionally. His mother is delicate and wilts within the confines of a petit bourgeois cage. The home itself was loving in his family's fashion, but it was also stifling as was often characteristic of conservative households of the time - an analogue is 1950s Cold War Eisenhower America.
At times the writing felt a bit self indulgent or undisciplined. For instance the retelling of the fables and fairy tales that were passed down in his family; it felt like these could have been pared down. Other times I would have liked to see more of an origin story of how his parents got together; the family history was recounted all around otherwise, so ten pages there might have shed additional light on their seemingly poor marital match.
Oz's tale of his childhood is panoramic as his family's story is overlaid by WWII, the Holocaust, and the Israeli War of Independence. Along the way Oz goes into family lore, friends and family who perished in Eastern Europe, and the warp and woof of life in working class and lower white collar Jerusalem. He wants the reader to see that at the personal level Israeli-Palestinian relations were once upon a time cordial.
The story also tracks Oz's path from his family's rightist Revisionist Zionism to a liberal member of Kibbutz Hulda. In glimpses of his teenage and adult life to come, Oz ultimately leaves Jerusalem after his mother's death and his father's remarriage for life on the kibbutz where he will come of age and where he will meet his future wife.
The book resonates with an American audience. It's hard to tell if it's because Oz has purposefully written an account suited for Western sensibilities. Or perhaps he was an Israeli equally rooted in the shared European past and the modern Israeli present and who held out hope for a liberal democratic Israeli future. Maybe it’s a combo of both....more
This book was painful by design as it painted a multisided picture of how our current troubles in the Middle East began. At the same time, in this nuaThis book was painful by design as it painted a multisided picture of how our current troubles in the Middle East began. At the same time, in this nuanced work, Ari Shavit showed the tremendous development of Israel from humble and complicated beginnings. From there he takes the account through the formative developments in the ensuing decades primarily through a number of vignettes with interlaced commentary. It’s a personal and journalistic story of over one hundred years from the Ottoman and British empires through the development of the land, dispossessions/persecutions on a number of sides, the trauma of the Holocaust, the Arab-Israeli Wars, the development of a hi-tech nation in the midst of all of that, the emergence of the threats from Iran and their proxies, and the breakdown of peace talks and the intifadas that bring us to the near present. Even if some of the history and the more extreme sides of the peoples are working against it, at the end of the day the only solution is two states for two indigenous people. At times the style is over-written. Still, it’s a balanced account for events and a side of the world that has often needed that....more
Engrossing account of the Lebanese Civil War on the one hand, and on the other a pretty poignant criticism of the Likud and Labor Unity government leaEngrossing account of the Lebanese Civil War on the one hand, and on the other a pretty poignant criticism of the Likud and Labor Unity government leading Israel in the 1980s. The young Thomas Friedman here was at the top of his game as he relied on his years of embedded journalism to chronicle the scene in Beirut and the underlying tribalism; the realities of the anarchy he depicts are more complex than the ones often envisioned with warring factions. At the same time, Friedman uses the book as an opportunity to take to task the leading Israeli politicians for avoiding and not seriously taking on the Palestinian Question. The book was originally published in 1989 and mostly covers his time in Beirut and then Jerusalem from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Decades have past since then, but the past continues to serve as prologue to events in the Middle East decades later....more
Loading...
