By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Amos Oz, one of Israels most popular novelists and author of the memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, visited Seattle on Dec. 6 to speak to a packed audience at the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Theater in Benaroya Hall. He spoke with JTNews editor Joel Magalnick before the engagement.
JTNews: In your stories and in your memoir, your characters have followed you throughout your life. Where has your writing taken you today?
Amos Oz: Im not sure that what you have read is about me. Its more about my parents than me. Im just a supporting character in this tale, and I will not write the same thing again. There will be no sequels, A Tale of Love and Darkness Rides Again, or The Son of A Tale of Love and Darkness, but I am a little reluctant to expose my pregnancy to x-rays. Its not very good for the child. I am working on something but I dont want to elaborate now.
JT: Why did you decide to write a memoir?
Oz: To make peace with myself, to make peace with my ancestors. I wrote this book as an attempt to decode and decipher certain mysteries of the family past, and as I was attempting to decode and decipher them, I discovered its a lot more exciting to describe them than to find out who that guy was or who is another.
JT: Talk about the stories you are trying to decode
Oz: Its a tale, a family tale: mother, father, son. Both were well meaning people, my father and mother, who loved one another. They loved their only child. They were nice and kind and sweet to one another, and all of this ended with a colossal tragedy: my mother killed herself when I was 12-and-a-half. My father declined and their only child was left alone in the world.
How could that happen, when there was nothing in the atmosphere reminiscent of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or Scenes of a Married Life by Ingmar Bergman none of it cruelty or clashing or hatred? This is precisely what I am writing, and this is precisely what I have not found.
What I did find a lot of, is a great deal of those people who I have memorialized in the book, the more I have appreciated and respected and liked them in their different ways, in the very conflicting and contradicting characters. So I wrote about them, but more so at the same time, I wrote a kind of saga about the 1940s and 50s, the years when everybody was waiting by the maternity room for the State of Israel to be born, and the years immediately after the birth of the State of Israel.
JT: How did you find out about these relatives, many of whom are now long gone?
Oz: Memory, partly research, mostly the work of a novelist who, like a paleontologist, relies on some facile little smashed bone to reconstruct an entire extinct creature by this single bone. Of course I had to reconstruct, I had to invent, I had to use my imagination certainly, but I could also rely on my own genes. They have been there before me, because their genes are my genes, so I control the genes.
JT: Do any family members in particular stand out?
Oz: My grandfather, who was married to a first cousin and was very unhappy for many, many years. She was not only his first cousin, she was 10 years older than himself. When she died, he discovered not only the delights of love but also the joy of sex. He was 77, and he turned out to be an irresistible, old-world kind of womanizer, sending chocolate boxes, remembering birthdays, kissing ladies hands, opening doors, reciting poetry. He had a stormy, ferocious love life for the remaining 20 years. He lived to be 97, he was healthy and in excellent shape all those times. Even in his 90s, he was still having love affairs with Lolitas of 55 or so who could be his children. They could be his grandchildren!
Now he had a certain secret about him, which apparently made him the idol of women despite age and everything: he was a very great listener. He loved listening to women. Apparently women find this a very sexy quality in a man, the ability to listen. Not just to pretend to listen, not just to wait for her to listen to what she has to say so that he can change the subject and discuss more important issues. He really loved listening to women.
Besides, he and his wife, my grandmother, and my other grandparents, they were all people who were kicked out by Europe in the 1930s, although they were the great lovers of Europe. The Tale of Love and Darkness is also the tale of their great unilateral, one-sided love for Europe, which ended with a terrible darkness.
JT: So they chose Israel?
Oz: They were kicked out. There was no choice there. Its not that they had screened various options and decided to go to Jerusalem because the climate was nice or the landscape was attractive. In the 1930s, no other country wanted them. There was no place they could go. The countries where they lived became unlivable for Jews. The countries where they wanted to go would not have them, so the land of Israel was a life raft.
I was born in Jerusalem 1939. My parents actually met and married in Jerusalem.
JT: What has the response been to the memoir?
Oz: The response has been totally unexpected for me. It became one of the all-time greatest bestsellers in the history of Israel. It was read both, as I initially assumed, by people who are the same vintage as myself, or from the same village as myself, but practically by everybody. One hundred thousand copies sold in a country where the most widespread tabloid sells about 200,000 copies, to give you a sense of proportion.
So that surprised me, but what surprised me even more is that the same or similar things happened in several European countries, where there is no Jewish readership to speak of, and where people have read this book not because of a specific interest in east European Jewish, but for the family drama or the family saga, or the sense of paradoxical reconciliation between the enemies which readers found in this book.
It was published in six or seven countries before it was published here in America. And its traveling to many more.
JT: Do you read the translations?
Oz: Only the English translation. The others cannot hurt me. If the Korean translation is not fluent, or the Catalan translation is not accurate, or the Norwegian translation is not musical enough, Ill never know about it. The English translation, I read, and I work with the translator usually by interrupting his work and filling in the piece of it that is wrong. But I cannot make it be constructive in both ways: I can usually tell him what is wrong, not whats right.
JT: And do you feel like its the same book?
Oz: Translating a work of literature is probably like playing a violin concerto on the piano. It can be done, it can be done very successfully, on one strict condition: never, ever try to force the piano to produce the sound of the violin. It will be grotesque. So I say to my English translator, as I say to people who translate me into languages I shall never be able to read: please be unfaithful in order to be loyal. It is necessary to sometimes find an equivalent idiom rather than translate in the same idiom, or to find a different register in English that may produce the same impact as the other register produces in Hebrew. What we are looking for is the impact and not the accuracy of the word.
JT: Do you find that you build relationships with your translators?
Oz: Yes, most of my books have been translated into English by Nicholas de Lange. It has been almost a monogamous relationship. He is not a professional translator, he is a professor of Theology at Cambridge University, and he translates very little else mostly memoirs as an aside. Ive had very few of my works translated by others than Nicholas de Lange. It is a mostly perfect monogamous relationship.
JT: What is the state of literature in Israel today?
Oz: Hebrew, modern Hebrew, contemporary Hebrew, has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is a language that is erupting with energies, a language into which a poet or a playwright can legislate your words or introduce new words or new events.
It is being changed by every influx of immigrants. Its volcanic, like molten lava, but at the same time that modern Hebrew is like Elizabethan English, Im not necessarily implying that each and every one of our writers in Tel Aviv is a Shakespeare. We have no more than a half a dozen of those right now.
But it is an extremely and excitingly vivacious literature, which travels extensively into other languages, and which ranges all the way from the traditional to the postmodern and deconstructionist, and from the very directly politically engaged to the surreal and fantastic and futuristic.
JT: Many films coming out of Israel today could be considered brilliant? Could the same be said about the literature?
Oz: Its not for me to judge the quality because I am a part of it. But I think the scene, the artistic scene, in Israel reflects the political and artistic awareness. Israelis read books and go to cinema. We read perhaps more than any other nation under the sun, per capita, proportionate to the population, except for the people of Iceland, who are not basically under the sun anyway.
But unlike Americans, Israelis do not read a novel in order to relax, or to broaden their horizons. They read in order to get worked up, in order to disagree with the writers or the characters, in order to get angry. We are a very argumentative people. So the temporal or the literary debate, the artistic debate in Israel, is very heated: Id say very Mediterranean by comparison.
JT: Do you find that people will read to get together just to argue?
Oz: People love to argue. You will find in A Tale of Love and Darkness that Israel in the 40s and the 50s and the Israel of today is really one big open-air seminary. Total strangers argue all the time with one another about everything. I think argumentativeness is the most prominent characteristic of Israeli society.
JT: Can that translate into the other languages?
Oz: I hope so. I dont know if people can get all the nuances of the arguments or the atmosphere, or the argumentativeness. This gene, or urge of world reforming which is there in almost everyone, people will argue with each other all the time. This I think is very vivid, both in the Israeli streets and in my tale of love and darkness.
JT: Do you feel there is a golden age of Israeli literature?
Oz: Its too early to have any perspective about this. The nation is about 55 years old, and modern Hebrew literature is about 200 years old. Its too early to try to wrap it up and sum it up.