Literature
Art
Life

Amos Oz: The Kibbutz Writer (1980)

[When I was invited for the first of two residencies at Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem, I persuaded the editor of Present Tense, which had commissioned my Gershom Scholem profile, to let me do likewise by the most prominent Israeli writer of my generation. Perhaps because Oz at forty-plus was a less substantial figure than Scholem at eighty-minus, my portrait is not as rich. Though it too was reprinted in Jewish Profiles, I never saw Oz again.]

I became a Socialist because my parents were right-wingers, and became a kibbutznik because my parents were town dwellers, and probably became a novelist because my father was a scholar.

—Amos Oz, to an interviewer (1973)

Kibbutz Hulda is in the valley between Jerusalem and Rehoveth, closer to the latter. Resembling other kibbutzim in the area, it has acres of cotton fields, several large factory buildings, smaller structures for recreation and dining, numerous multi-unit living quarters and, of course, a swimming pool. What makes Kibbutz Hulda different from its agribusiness neighbors is the fact that since 1955 it has been the residence of Israel’s best-known and most respected younger novelist, Amos Oz.

Born in Jerusalem, May 4, 1939, the only child of Yehuda Arieh Klausner, a prominent scholar and right-wing zionist, Oz was a precocious, headstrong youngster, not unlike the bright child in his recent book, The Hill of Evil Counsel. At fifteen, he bolted from the family home to live on a kibbutz only a few miles away from what was then the Jordanian border. Further to divorce himself from his family, he took another name, his present one, pronounced Ah-mos Awz (not like the Wizard’s name). At first, he worked in Hulda’s fields, while finishing secondary school. Inducted into the Israeli army in 1957, the same year in which he became a full member of the kibbutz, he served in the Nahal, establishing new settlements. In his spare time, he was writing—initially patriotic poems, detective stories and other juvenilia. In 1960, a few poems and a story appeared in an adult literary magazine, marking his professional debut.

Since Kibbutz Hulda has been such a prominent part of Oz’s life, it seemed best for me to meet him there; the drive from Jerusalem took less than an hour. His studio is buried in a bungalow block of four small apartments, ideally suited for single people; and once I knocked on the appropriate door, Oz came out to greet me with a firm Israeli handshake. A short slight man, with brown hair, warm blue eyes and a ready smile, he invited me inside. Wearing loosely hung jeans and a work shirt, he reminded me of the American actor Paul Newman; photographs on his books scarcely do justice to his good looks. Noticing my dehydration, he offered coffee with powdered cream or tea. I wanted cold soda; but all his studio had, he apologized, was a hot plate.

The anteroom of his studio is roughly five feet by eight, with a cot along one wall and an exercycle, of all contraptions, in the middle. Next to it is a small bathroom-shower. The back room, perhaps eight feet by twelve, is his true work room, with a desk in front of its sole screened window, a wall full of books in English and Hebrew, a cabinet with cookies and extra copies of his own books, as well as another cot and a large radio and two plain easy chairs in which we could sit and talk. Since there is no telephone, his neighbors wanting to talk with him generally come to the window. Speaking English easily, if imperfectly, with a British-Israeli accent, Oz talks in direct, simple sentences, much like a high school teacher, which he is. We mostly discussed his books, since it is these that introduce his name to the outside world.

In 1961, he told me, he came back to Hulda, married Nily, who was born on the kibbutz. (Her father came in the second stream of settlers in 1930.) Oz fathered a daughter and went back to work in the cotton fields. One Saturday evening, the kibbutz assembly, where every adult has one vote, selected him to go to the Hebrew University for two years, because the Kibbutz needed a teacher. He points out that the kibbutz sent him for only two years, rather than the full three, “because they did not want me to get a degree. They probably thought that if I took a degree, I would run away. I fooled them twice, taking the degree in two years [in philosophy and Hebrew literature] and coming back.”

Beginning in 1963, he taught full-time, six days a week through the long Israeli mornings, writing in the evenings and on the Sabbath. Having received some professional recognition for his stories, he applied for one day off every week; this was granted at the end of 1963. Two years later, he published his first book, Artzot Ha’tan (Where the Jackal Howls)—a collection of stories that has never appeared in book form outside of Israel, although parts of it appear in English now and then in magazines and anthologies. Fortunately, it won the Holon Prize and thus two days each week off from teaching, illustrating what Israelis call “creeping annexation.”

In 1966, he published Elsewhere, Perhaps, a portrait of kibbutz life that remains, in my judgment, the most interesting of his three novels. Given its subject, this was read by Oz’s kibbutz partners and became, needless to say, an object of argument. As he remembers it, the responses “ranged from ‘How dare you’ to ‘At long last, someone is telling the truth,’ It is useful to live in such an immediate and frank milieu. I’m surrounded by people I knew well, who know me well, who don’t withhold judgment on my writing.” Most readers suspect that in Elsewhere, Perhaps Oz was writing about his own kibbutz, but certain details suggest otherwise. The fishponds that are prominent in the fictional Kibbutz Metsudat Ram do not exist at Hulda, and there is no analogue for the part-time poet Reuben Harish at Hulda, where Oz has always been the only published writer. “I never use living models,” he explains. “If I did, it would be difficult for me to remain here.” He paused to light a cigarette. “It is more like photosynthesis than photography. Besides, people have such high opinions of themselves that if you portrayed them as they are, they would not recognize themselves.”

The technical achievement of Elsewhere, Perhaps is Oz’s handling of several major characters, ranging from the poet Harish and his attractive teenage daughter Noga to the kibbutz truck driver Ezra Berger, his wife Bronka and his brother Zachariah (a.k.a. “Siegfried”), who left the kibbutz to earn his fortune in post-WWII Germany. Not only are all these characters richly developed, but Oz realizes several remarkable feats with the book’s narrative voice. For most of the novel, the speaker is the kibbutz itself, an omniscient voice that speaks in a “we” tense that Oz regards as analogous to the chorus in Greek tragedy. From time to time, however, each of the seven principal characters speaks in the first-person singular; this shifting point-of-view is, per se, a technical tour-de-force.

Oz acknowledges that his fictions begin with characters and thus with characteristic voices, and most of his readers would agree that he is far more skilled at characterizations, often swiftly rendered, than plotting. When I suggested to him that the character of Ezra Berger “takes over the book, because he initiates no wrong, although wrongs are done to him,” Oz concurred that Ezra “is the only mature character in that novel and thus in a way dearest to me.”

Controversial though the book was at Hulda, Oz did not feel any pressure to leave his kibbutz. “I’ve always been a good waiter in the dining halls, and that’s what counts around here. That’s how people know me. I also do my turn as a nightwatchman, and still do. The last time was three weeks ago.” He lit another cigarette. “With a submachine gun in hand, you patrol the fields and feel heroic, from eleven at night to six in the morning. And when I’m between things, I go out and work in the fields, pickings apples and driving the tractor.”

Kibbutz Hulda collects all of Oz’s royalties, which now amount to over $20,000 per year. “Every penny I earn, I sign the back of the check and hand it over the treasurer. Everything I need for my work, even a stay in a hotel away from here, I can get. All I need to do is ask the treasurer to pay for it. I never had to rely on publishers’ advances. I never had to commit myself to a deadline. I don’t fill out income tax forms. I have no mortgage.” In return, Oz gets room, board and an education for his family and for himself both a workroom and the “Europa” cigarettes that he chain-smokes. He remembers that the director of the “work rota” once offered to assign two elderly members as secretary-assistants, “with an eye to increasing my productivity.” Oz refused; he was not the cottage factory some colleagues wanted him to be.

Were My Michael (1968), his second novel, not finished just before the Six-Day War, it might never have been done. Oz, by then a reservist, joined a tank unit in Sinai, just as during the Yom Kippur War he would fight in the Golan Heights. The second bit of good fortune was that this novel sold exceedingly well—over 60,000 copies, in eleven printings, in Israel alone. (Given that fact that Israel has three million people, this would be the equivalent of selling four million copies in the U.S.) To this day, most Israeli readers identify it as the Oz novel they’ve read (and like best), much as American readers would still identify Philip Roth with Portnoy’s Complaint. Such native success remains a mystery of Oz. “The book has no fighting, no sex, no nothing. It must have touched an open nerve somewhere.” My Michael has since been translated into English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, German and Japanese. Whew.

A strange, deceptively simple novel, My Michael is dominated by its narrator, Hannah Gonen, a young housewife who tells in a dry voice of her disillusionments, dreams, depression and eventual breakdown. Her husband Michael is an inordinately considerate and patient graduate student in geology who seems unable to relieve his wife’s funk. Some of the novel’s best passages deal with Jerusalem, especially as it was in the fifties, when Oz still lived there; and its readers are continually made aware of how changes in its seasonal weather are affecting the characters. Oz thinks the novel is about “the morning after,” not only for a marriage but for Israel itself, in the fifties, after the initial fervor to establish a new country had died down. However, this he admits “is not a sufficient explanation” for its popularity. Just after it was published, Oz received another day off from teaching, reducing his kibbutz work week to three days.

In 1969, he received, “out of the blue,” an invitation from St. Cross College, Oxford, to be writer-in-residence for a year; and he took his whole family, now expanded to include two daughters, for their first trip outside Israel. “It was my first meeting,” he remembers, “with European weather, a foreign language, Gothic architecture, and an organized sequence of time. You could look at a building and see several strata of history.” It was there that Oz first met an Englishman who has since played a consequential collaborative role in his fiction’s career. Nicholas de Lange, five years younger than Oz, is now a lecturer on post-Biblical and medieval Hebrew Literature at Cambridge University. Initially familiar with classical Hebrew, he asked to read Oz’s work in its original language. De Lange produced a sample translation that was so successful that all of Oz’s English editions have since been “translated by Nicholas de Lange, in collaboration with the author.” Oz added, “That’s a lie. It is translated by de Lange with interruptions by the author.” Oz customarily goes over the translator’s drafts, citing inadequacies and proposing changes or the need for them. “We work together like best enemies—reading every word, every sentence, every paragraph. The English translation is the only one that can hurt me.”

It was at Oxford that Oz wrote two novellas, “Crusade” and “Last Love,” both of which ware published as Unto Death (197l). The former is a gruesome and nasty story about Christian crusaders who steal and kill in a vain effort to reach Jerusalem. “Last Love,” which I regard as Oz’ s single greatest fiction, is a profoundly penetrating monologue by a sixty-eight year-old kibbutz circuit-lecturer, Shagra Unger, a veteran agitator whose talk mixes petty problems with cosmic perceptions as he fears his career’s end which he, paranoid, blames on hidden Bolsheviks.

“Most of my characters believe in something which I don’t believe,” Oz explains, particularly referring to the stories in Unto Death. “They believe in some simple formula, be it ‘elsewhere’ or be it ‘violence’ or be it ‘love,’ whatever some of them mean by that word.” One development within Oz’s fiction is that his structures by now were becoming more concise. If the narrator of My Michael took an entire novel to tell her story, that of “Last Love” took only a novella, and later narrators would be even swifter.

His third novel, Touch the Water, Touch the Wind (1973) is considerably shorter than Elsewhere, Perhaps, even though its materials belong to an elongated novel. Oz describes it as “a problematic substitute for a 19th century family saga. The crux is an uncle of mine whom I’ve never seen, my father’s brother. When my father came to Palestine, his brother preferred to remain in Vilna, where he was a lecturer on comparative literature at the university. He was a devoted European, when everyone else was a Communist or a nationalist patriot. He refused to give into Zionism or any other chauvinism; so when the Nazis came, they killed him, his wife and his son, my cousin Daniel. Throughout my childhood, I was told that Uncle David was too clever to die; he will show up.” This myth of David Klausner informs the principal character of Touch the Water.

Oz’s intentions notwithstanding, however, the novel suffers from a preposterous surface and is generally regarded as his least successful effort. Professor Robert Alter, perhaps Oz’s most attentive American critic, calls it “unpersuasive, especially when compared with the genuinely hallucinatory intensity of his best writing.” Oz, in his own defense, suggests that his readers regard, it as “religious science fiction.”

His most recently translated book, The Hill of Evil Counsel (1976), marks a return to excellence. These three interrelated novels deal with Jerusalem in the mid-forties, during the British mandate, just prior to independence. The Hill of Evil Counsel, of Oz’s’ title, was the location of the British High Commissioner’s Office. “The Jerusalem of my boyhood was a nuthouse. There were more madmen there than anywhere else in the world. Everyone was a messiah. Everyone was a redeemer. Everyone had a formula for universal redemption in one go.” He pauses to light another cigarette. “Many of the pioneers declared that they came to Israel to build it, and to be rebuilt by it. Jerusalemites in those days secretly yearned to crucify, and to be crucified. They thought the world needed urgent redemption—redemption in violence, pain and bloodshed.” My face turned skeptical. “They all had the same urge—purify, get purified; redeem the world, through bloodshed, in one way or another. Either kill the bad guys to help the good guys, or kill oneself, in order to cause a shock that would change the world.” In these sentences, Oz both creates the atmosphere and defines the theme of a book that appeared, in Lange’s translation, in the U.S. and England in 1978.

There is more Oz to come, to be sure. In 1978, his Tel-Aviv publisher, Am Oved, issued a juvenile story, Sumchi, that will appear in the U.S. in 1980. At least one Israeli critic, Dan Omer, identifies it as Oz’s very best fiction. In the summer of 1979 appeared his first book of non-fiction, a collection of essays on literature, politics, kibbutzim, and socialism. He expects that a selection of these will soon appear in English. On his desk is a novel, a long one, on which he has been working for several years. Since he need not write for money nor honor deadlines, he would not say when it might be done. Nor would he tell me about it. “Just say I’m superstitious.” In 1976, he suffered a serious auto accident that put him in the hospital for six months and set his writing back even more.

He typically writes his novel in long-hand, initially in intense spurts at some place away from the kibbutz, with its scheduled demands. He begins with characters, which come to him at times in dreams, or as voices, or as “mannerisms I can identify.” Then he edits his material down to its present form. In passing, he suggests, perhaps implicitly referring to his work in progress, that “three thousand pages then become four hundred.” The final drafts he types himself essentially with two index fingers, on the Hebrew typewriter in his workroom. He confesses to having started more fictions than he has finished, mostly because “I often don’t like what I am doing.” The day we met, he had been at work since 5:30 a.m., which, he remarks, “wasn’t especially early on a Kibbutz,” where the farm workers are in the fields at 4:30 a.m. During the academic year, he still teaches literature and an introduction to philosophy two days a week in a regional high school.

Not unlike other kibbutzniks, he wants to show a visitor his home, first walking me through the children’s houses, divided by age, where he introduces me to his son, Daniel Yehuda Arieh, now one and one-half, named after both his cousin and his father. Amos Oz points with personal pride to the intercom microphone-speaker in every childrens’ bedroom. These are attached to a central listening station, where a female night-watch person spends every night. The system was purchased in 1965, Oz explains, with the proceeds of his first literary prize. Whereas his royalties are fed directly into the kibbutz treasury, prize money he can use within Hulda as he wishes. I propose that his next prize be devoted to establishing on Hulda “a retreat for the creative” similar to Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem, where artists and writers would stay for specified lengths. “Hulda,” I suggest, “seemed like a great place for writing a book.” He laughs, “I hadn’t thought of it.”

From the nursery, we went to the 5, 6 & 7’s, where thirty screaming youngsters remind Oz that, “I owe them a story. One of my Sabbath duties is telling stories to children, and I began one for them that got interrupted.” He moves us from the twelve-year olds to the fourteens and then to his elder daughter, Fania, a short slight woman, more delicate than her father. Now eighteen, she is presently completing her “matriculation exams” at high school. We then tour the kibbutz chick-pea plant and the transformer factory, which Oz identifies as particularly profitable (although quite contrary to the Tolstoyan nature orientation of the Kibbutz’s founders). We observe the cotton fields that extend, in one direction as far as the eye could see, and in another direction the hill that, prior to 1967, was the Jordanian border and thus a source of artillery fire and infiltration. He takes me to the kibbutz movement archive where he wife Nily works, cataloging not only publications about the movement but such documents as minutes of early meetings and personal diaries. Next to it is the auditorium in which the kibbutz amateur theatrical group performs and films are projected twice a week. Under it is a library with 4,000 volumes, in several languages, and “our version of a British pub” in which free beer and coffee are dispensed every evening. At the entrance to Hulda is the road that runs from Jerusalem to Rehoveth. Since Oz can get a kibbutz car only if he registers for it several days in advance, he customarily hitchhikes to the nearby cities.

Having lived at Hulda for nearly twenty-five years, he knows when everything was built, and he gives a friendly nod to everyone we saw. Nobody asks about me. Nor do they ask about his novel-in-progress, perhaps because no one cares, or because they knew full well that he is working hard on it, or because, as Oz insists, he is more famous at home as an ace waiter than as a writer. “It is impossible to act like a celebrity,” he confides, “when you happen to live on a kibbutz. Hulda is as close to an extended family as you can get in the world. If I lived in New York City, I wouldn’t have such an intimate acquaintance with four hundred different people. I’m not William Faulkner, but whatever he could find in one town in the deep South of the states, I can find here.”

After lunch, compliments of the kibbutz, we return to his study for another round of conversation. He speaks of the Israeli literary scene as “the most fascinating, perhaps not the best, in the world today, because of the compression of development. You have symbolists and realists, surrealists and dadaists, all converging in a small country. There are a hundred writers in Israel, working in a tremendous variety of styles, tendencies, concepts of literature, manners of writing. There is not even a vague consensus of what literature is about. It is possible to be in the right Tel-Aviv cafe, at the right time of day, to get the John Donne, the Lord Byron and the Allen Ginsberg of Hebrew poetry, all alive and kicking—not on speaking terms, but on screaming terms.” Among the currently interesting Israeli writers, he mentions the fictioner A. B. Yehoshua and the poet Yehudi Amachai—both already well-known in the U.S.—and then Amalia Kahana-Karmon, whom he characterized as “remotely related to Virginia Woolf—never translated and perhaps opposed to it.”

Oz writes novels in part from a love of the Hebrew language, which he admires for its variety of accents and national styles (Russian immigrants speaking it perceptibly differently from, say, Americans), and then for the opportunities for invention. Since the language is young, so to speak, it is possible for an author to coin new words or invent fresh constructions. “Hebrew is a flexible language. It can take in all sorts of syntaxes. One can still legislate within the language, create new forms.” (Much of this cannot be translated, unfortunately. “Translating Hebrew into a Western language is different from translating French into German. It is traveling a long, long way.”) He also writes novels out of “a delight in comprehensive organization—hierarchy, priority, interaction. Now, organization is, as we know, a religious experience.” He pauses to ignite another cigarette. “When I fail to tell a story, or to write a novel, or when I have a direct and unambivalent message, then I write an essay. To put it in simpler terms, when I totally agree with myself, then I write an article.”

Remembering his extensive military experience, not only in battle but in the reserves, I ask why he has not yet written a war novel. “It is impossible. Those who have been on the battlefield know what it is like, and those who haven’t don’t now. Tell a monk what it is like to make love. War is made of smells and stenches—burning rubber, gunpowder, burning metal. There is no way to convey this in words. I’ve read half a dozen war novels, Israeli and otherwise; but there is no chance.”

Within Israel itself, Oz is as well-known for his political opinions as for his novels, and his position is customarily classified as “leftwing Zionist.” He has a different definition of it. “I’m an evolutionist, rather than a revolutionist, in everything—story-telling, socialism, or sex. Although I’ve often been presented as ‘radical’ in Israeli politics, I think I’ve never been radical in anything. Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’ve always believed in an inconsistent compromise. Both sides have a solid, well-rounded case that turns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—not the Israeli-Arab conflict, which is something else—into a tragedy, rather than a Wild West film. Heroes of tragedy, obsessed by an obsession for justice, destroy and annihilate each other. So people die, and justice prevails.

“The only way of surviving a tragic conflict is an inconsistent compromise. Politically speaking, two people regard this country as their one and only homeland. So, the only way to survive is to divide it. Practically speaking, that means two independent states, in land hardly big enough for one. I agree that in principle, in theory and in historical practice, there is no difference between East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem, between Hebron and Haifa, between Nablus and Jaffa. We also know that the Palestinian sense of identity, of uniqueness, is largely a bi-product of Zionism, but we cannot change that. Palestinians and Israelis alike have perfect claims, each legitimate and just within itself, over every inch of this country. Either they divide it, or else they destroy one another.

“I’ve never been enthusiastic about national states altogether. The concept of civilizations waving flags attached to territories strikes me as archaic and murderous. In a way, we Jews have demonstrated for millennia what I should like to see as the next phase of history—a civilization without territorial boundaries; two hundred civilizations without a single nation-state. But as a Jew, I cannot afford this anymore. I have set an example for two millennia, but nobody followed.” He has espoused both of these positions since the end of the 1967 war.

The day is hot and dry; and although Oz seems cool and relaxed, his chain-smoking notwithstanding, his visitor is beginning to wilt. Oz suggests going to the Olympic-sized swimming pool, which suits me fine. However, his own schedule requires him to take care of kibbutz business, perhaps returning some of the telephone calls that collect in its central office. At 4:00 pm., he customarily sees his children, all of whom live elsewhere on the kibbutz; and the family stays together through dinner, perhaps in the Oz parents’ apartment, or in the communal dining hall. By 8:00 p.m. or so, the senior Ozs will retire to their small single bedroom apartment, which he compares to “a submarine,” where he will read into the night and sleep prior to another day as a kibbutz writer, which is not a literary term but a sociological one—a definition of one contemporary master’s singular professional existence.