Vale Amos Oz - 4.5.39 - 28.12.18

Deep in the midst of writing my new book, I seem only to surface in this blog whenever a favourite writer with whom I have had the pleasure of sharing a conversation dies. Sadly, the subject of the following conversations is Israeli novelist, essayist, short story writer and peace activist, Amos Oz, who died of cancer in his sleep aged 79.

Here is a conversation I recorded with him in 2004 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on his acclaimed memoire A Tale of Love and Darkness a brilliant and harrowing work of memory and imagination, set in the Jerusalem of his birth, a world full of contradictions. Amos Oz writes about his family, politics, history, language and the suicide of his mother.

Born in Jerusalem, Oz's work has been translated into more than 30 languages in over 35 countries. He writes about universal themes. He once said that if he had to describe his literary work, it would be about unhappy families. He said the family being the most A Tale of Love and Darkness, is a kind of memoir, a work of imagination at times, a chant-and even a prayer. It describes what it was like to be Amos Oz growing up in Jerusalem in a world shaped by the history of the European destruction of the Jews, but very much not Europe-a world of new hopes and new Jews.

There was Amos and his father and his mother in this little world-a world that would be shattered with his mother's suicide when he was twelve and a half. When we met in Edinburgh, we began by hearing a short reading by Amos Oz in his beloved language of Hebrew, a language that had been revitalised from the ancient Bible, and in which Amos Oz says he dreams and makes love.

Amos Oz: Thank you, Ramona, for this lovely introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, friends; good evening, shalom, erev tov. I'm going to read you a very short bit in Hebrew because I don't want to put too much strain on one or two of you who are not yet fluent in Hebrew. And then Ramona will read the same and more in English, and then of course we'll have a debate and a discussion. I just wanted to say, at the very beginning of this reading, that there has been a little argument, whether A Tale of Love and Darkness should be defined as an autobiography or a memoir or a history or a book of fiction, or a sing-song-or what. The definition of this book is in its title. It's called 'a tale' of love and darkness, and for me at least, a tale it is; which means a combination of memory and invention and variation and repetition and recollection-and yes, fiction as well.[reads in Hebrew ... ]

Ramona Koval: [ reads in English from ... For years we had a regular arrangement for a telephonic link with the family in Tel Aviv ... to ... virtually everything was forbidden, or not done, or not very nice. ]

Ramona Koval: They were uneasy about what they said, but they were also uneasy about talking in Hebrew. But they were committed to it, weren't they, as a language?

Amos Oz: Before I answer that, permit me just to thank Nicholas De Lange, to whom we owe this fluent and marvellous translation into English, which hardly sounds like a translation. He is not hear tonight, but I think we are all indebted to him. Yes, language-my parents were great polyglots. They use to chat between themselves in Polish and Russian for me not to understand. And about 95 per cent of the time they wanted me not to understand what they were saying. Then they used to read books in German, English, and sometimes in French, for culture. They dreamed their dreams, I presume-I never know-but I think they dreamed their dreams in Yiddish. Me, they taught Hebrew and only Hebrew, because they somehow feared-I presume; we never discussed it; I presume. They only taught me Hebrew, they did not want me to fit any European language for fear that if I knew a single European language, I will eventually be seduced by the deadly charms of Europe; I'll go back to Europe and catch my death.

That's where I come from. I come from people who survived Europe by the skin of their teeth and loved it none the less. Yes, they were refugees, immigrants, regarding themselves as Zionist idealists who came to the country to build it and be rebuilt by it. But essentially they were humiliated refugees who were kicked out of their places. Now of course, all those emotions were censored, because there was a huge contradiction between their outspoken beliefs-we are building a new nation, we are building a new country, we are optimistic, we face the future, we are going to do great things. And the internal world of insult, humiliation, insecurity, fear and a lasting dread of a second Holocaust-impending second Holocaust-which of course they will not share with a small child like myself. So we talked culture, we talked literature, we talked world politics. I used to discuss Stalin and Churchill with my father when I was 5 or 6. We used to phrase letters to the Pope in Rome. But we never talked about our feelings; neither him nor me nor my mother. There was a wholesome censorship on everything to do with feelings.

Ramona Koval: We talked about Europe and the new country. But if we look at the country itself; and just before this passage there's a discussion about how you felt about Tel Aviv, living in Jerusalem. And there's a sense that there's this huge gap; that you thought of yourselves somehow as provincial living in Jerusalem compared with Tel Aviv. Anyone who's been to Israel knows that it's a couple of hours drive; it's not exactly a huge gap, physically, geographically. What did Tel Aviv mean to you; what did Jerusalem mean to you?

Amos Oz: Well the whole of Israel, then and now, is the size of a handkerchief, more or less. But Jerusalem was out-of-the-way, although it was the historical, eternal capital and so on and so forth, and the location of the university. Jerusalem was still out-of-the-way. The great and exciting things apparently happened beyond the mountains in Galilee, in the kibbutzim, on the coastal plain and in young, dynamic, bohemian, self-assured, optimistic, cheerful Tel Aviv. We Jerusalem-ites were kind of marginalised by Tel Aviv. The newspapers came from Tel Aviv, the theatre came from Tel Aviv, the big political arguments and diversities came from Tel Aviv. Even the Gothic came from Tel Aviv. So I actually grew up into a somewhat Chekhovian experience of people craving for Europe; and if not Europe, then at least-if not Moscow, Moscow in the Three Sisters, then at least Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv in our own. And you couldn't even say that Tel Aviv was just one telephone call away from us, because a telephone call was a major military operation, as you have just heard.

Ramona Koval: But what about the characters that you lived amongst-they're out of Russian novels and plays, aren't they? Describe some of those characters.

Amos Oz: I grew up in a neighbourhood full of self-fashioned ideologists. We had more ideologies than individuals. We had, in those everlasting arguments in our little yard, we had more opinions than participants, because everyone had a divided mind and soul on each issue. There was a dentist who claimed that he knew personally Stalin and maintained a long correspondence with Stalin and was on the verge of converting Stalin to humanism. He needed a little more time. There was another one who was a bookbinder and a self-fashioned world authority on Jewish mysticism. A third one knew the precise nuances of the different trends within the Russian nihilist movement in the 19th century. Everyone was an expert on something. They were all great talkers.

They all maintained, by the way, that talking is no good for the Jews: we have talked long enough. Time to go back to physical work and silence. We need to toil the land. We need to become labourers, we need to become totalitarians, we need to change. And this was a subject of endless talking. They talked day and night and day an night and day and night about the need to stop talking. You know, in a strange way, although now I can see how funny they were, my heart goes out to them. They were unwanted people. Refugees who were thrown out of their original countries. Moreover they were people who believed in language, believed in words and believed in ideas.

Every one of them in his or her own way was deeply devoted to something. Perhaps something different each day-including some very eccentric idea on redeeming the world by converting everybody to drinking goat milk and nothing else. Or redeeming the world by growing food in flowerpots and thus having enough food for the entire population. Not that they succeeded in dealing with our little flower pots. So I grew up in a rather Russian, Chekhovian atmosphere. Although the neighbourhood was full of Tolstoyans. Many people who believed in Tolstoy's ideas. Some of them even looked exactly like Tolstoy, with a Russian shirt and the boots, and looking like a Russian peasant with the impressive white beard and shock of white hair like a Biblical patriarch. When I first saw a picture of Tolstoy in a book, I knew him from the neighbourhood. I knew several of the type. He was not original; he was imitating the people in our neighbourhood.

So they were Tolstoyans, but I take it a little further; they were Tolstoyans with a tormented Dostoyevskian soul. But those Tolstoyans who had tormented Dostoyevskian souls, they lived in a Chekhovian provincial condition and in a Gregorian political realism. That's the Russian message.

Ramona Koval: I want us to shrink further into this little apartment; a basement apartment that your parents lived in, because the book begins with a bed, a bed in a small flat, a small apartment; a bed that can be concealed during the day but takes up all the space at night. Your parents' bed. In this cramped flat-you describe the cramped flat many times in the book, but when we visit it through this boy's eye, it seems enormous. As big as the world.

Amos Oz: Well I was born and I grew up in this submarine. The size of that flat, the basement flat in which I was born, was roughly the size of this stage. I'm not exaggerating. It was divided into four or five very small spaces, very much like a submarine. Fairly dark, because it only had two front windows and two lattices looking into a yard. But this was my world. You have to bear in mind, at this time children were not allowed to run out except in very limited hours. Seven o'clock each night, Jerusalem went under a British-imposed military curfew. On the few nights when the British have not imposed curfew, people were used to it, and kind of self-imposed a curfew upon themselves. So the city will shut down at 7 o'clock.

If you promise to take the following with a big grain of salt, I'll tell you that the former British mandate governor of Jerusalem, a Scotsman, I forget his name, came to visit Jerusalem forty years later. He was a very old man, and he was shown around by Mayor Teddy Kollek and was hugely impressed by the evolution and the development of Jerusalem, but he had a little question to the Mayor. He said, 'Mayor, why haven't you lifted the curfew which I imposed forty years ago?' Because it's still a very sleepy city and very little of nightlife.

So life was introversive and the submarine of the apartment was my world. This is where I virtually spent most of the hours of the first ten or eleven years of my life. Most of the time, like in the submarine or a jail, I was inside the apartment: father, mother, myself, and thousands of books in 16 or 17 languages-everywhere. Under the bed, in the kitchen, in the lavatory, in the long, winding, dark corridor; in every possible and impossible corner: books, pamphlets and leaflets. This was the landscape of my childhood. Where other children had the sports or the yard or the woods or the fields; I grew up in this bookish, claustrophobic basement.

Ramona Koval: And you say that wherever you had a box of dominoes or matches or buttons, there was a battle. Tell me about those battles.

Amos Oz: Well I was, as a kid, a terrible chauvinist, militarist and warmonger. I loved fighting. I loved war-on the rug, where I would re-live not only world war two but all the historical defeats of the Jewish people in 3,000 years, and I will reverse those defeats into victories by simple means: when the Romans conquered, smashed and destroyed Jerusalem in the first century AD, I would re-conduct the battle, but this time provide the Jewish side with a couple of machineguns. That was sufficient to bring the entire Roman empire down on its knees and wave an Israeli flag on the Imperial Palace in Rome and on the Seven Hills of Rome. Hence the Israeli quest for building settlements everywhere outside our homeland. So I was a militarist, I was a chauvinist, I was a lover of fighting and of war, and I seeked revenge for a history of lasting humiliations. I know one or two people maintain that I haven't changed much-but I have.

Ramona Koval: But this warmonger, this young warmonger at five years old makes a card for his little room, or the part of the flat that is his own, and the card says 'Amos Klausner, writer'.

Amos Oz: Yes. In fact I thought to become a writer was the only thing to do because everyone around me was a writer of sorts. Including the dentist who corresponded with Stalin or the expert on Russian nihilism. Everybody wrote, day and night. People wrote books, articles, essays, letters to the editor, letters to each other; memoirs, private diaries. There was not a single living soul in the neighbourhood or in my family who was not writing something. So I thought, how else can anyone in the world make a living? How little I knew, in those days. But it was my childhood fantasy. Not to become the kind of writer I am today, but to become a very militant, political writer of nationalistic nonsense rather than a teller of stories. At the same time, I was addicted to storytelling both as a teller and as a recipient of stories, especially from my mother, who was a born storyteller.

And very often in the long winter nights when my father would sit with his endless scholarly research, she and I will sit in the kitchen and she will tell me her invented-I think-very unusual stories. Not the kind of stories mothers normally tell children. Some of them very scary. Some of them very bizarre, esoteric, surreal-or even diabolical. And her stories inspired me in a very deep and dark way. They went into my dreams and they went into-obviously, into my subconscious-and they went into my desire to tell a story in a way no one ever told it before. Not just to tell a story.

Ramona Koval: You wanted to rescue people, too, in those stories.

Amos Oz: Yes. It was my other ambition. I wanted to be a fireman. I wanted to rescue people. I wanted to rescue my own mother so that she will marry me. I was very little and very simple. I felt, next to writing-or even ahead of writing-the best thing to do is to have this marvellous smart uniform of a fireman. That will be my way of impressing the girls. I'll save them all and they will love me for it.

Ramona Koval: What did you learn about memory when you wrote this book?

Amos Oz: There was a postman in our neighbourhood whom I remember very vividly, although it's more than fifty years ago. And this postman had a strange habit. Before he delivered the envelopes, the letters, into our mailboxes, he would add a little note of his own on the outside of the envelope. Sometimes he will write: 'never trust the British-remember Perfidious Albion-they are not to be trusted on anything.' Other times he will write: 'You are too permissive and too easygoing with your children. You are not doing them a favour by allowing everything.' Sometimes he will simply write on the outside of an envelope: 'Your washing has been hanging on the line for 3 or 4 days now and the pigeons ...'You know when I wrote A Tale of Love and Darkness, I likened myself many times to this postman, Mr Meilleur, because as I was digging back in time, going into the intimate world of my parents and then of my grandparents and then even my great-grandparents-I was sensing that I was actually carrying a letter from my parents to my children, who did not really know my parents. From my grandparents to my grandchildren. And perhaps-I don't know-from my ancestors to those who are not yet born.

And even as I carry this letter from the bygone generations to the young generations, I was on the outside of the envelope writing some of my own life. On the outside of the envelope. But I have also discovered that there is no such thing as memory. There is a memory of a memory. There is a scene or an event or an occurrence which had become part of the family folklore: repeated, told many times by my parents in order to boast, or in order to impress other people. And I remember their version. Then some vague glimmer of a different version of the same occurrence was flickering underneath the version of my parents'. And something even different underneath. So what you really have-not just me, in writing A Tale of Love and Darkness-every one of us, every one of you; what we often have is not a memory, but a memory of a memory. Or a memory of a remembered version. Of a memory not of something that happened, but something that we have told many times and we are telling again and again. And with all this interplay between many shadows and reflections-like the moon caught in a pool, reflected from the pool, not from the heaven, in a windowpane. And what you see, really, is not the moon in the heaven, but the reflection of a reflection of a reflection. Memory plays funny games, and I went with this game. You know, I didn't care about the documentary value of this or that particular episode in the story. I never wanted to accept the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, because I think it's a very artificial distinction.

Ramona Koval: And in fact you as the writer appear in the story, and you say-you know, there is self-reflection-you say you wonder if you should write about your teacher Isabella and her army of cats, because you say they were amusing, but they don't contribute anything to the progress of the story. And then you go on, 'Contribute? Progress? I don't know what can contribute to the progress of the story because as yet I have no idea where this story wants to go, and in fact why it needs contributions or progress.' And that made me stop, and I thought, could it really be that you didn't know the destination of your story? Because the destination would seem to be the only one-for a man with your history and the fact that your mother died with you such a young boy-as there would be only one destination.

Amos Oz: You are partly right, Ramona, in posing this question. All the different-the many different parts of this book-they all lead to the cataclysmic event of my mother's death, which is really told and retold and retold, and finally told in great detail at the very end of the book. And yet the hardest, here, was the composition, the structure. Hence the sense of, where am I going? Does it contribute, where does it take me? Because it is not a linear memoir in any way. If anything, it moves in circles around itself like a fugue. And it's looking for many devious parts, to kind of postpone the cataclysmic event of my mother's actual death.

And yet it is there right from the beginning. So it is not chronological. It is not linear. The structure or the composition tormented me for a very long time. And in fact the hardest thing-people ask me, was it hard for you to recall those traumatic experiences? No, it was not, because I have been there before, writing this book. Was it hard for you to remember the details? No, it was not, because where I couldn't remember, I invented.

What was hard; almost impossible, was to find the kind of structure or composition for this ocean of details. This almost Homeric, I would say-not in quality but in scope-Homeric scope of detail and detail and detail, when each detail is on the one hand independent; and on the other hand part of a structure, part of a symphony, a note in a symphony.

Ramona Koval: And this, the repetition, the way family stories are repeated, told in many situations, recounted, rephrased-and the circles you talk about, the tales that circle the moment of your mother's death, getting closer like a moth to a flame. And throughout there is a single bird, singing the opening five notes of 'Für Elise', like a prayer. Tell me about those five notes.

Amos Oz: There is nothing I can tell you about this bird which the book itself doesn't tell you. It's just some kind of a refrain, if you wish, of a mourning refrain, which is like a lamentation. And it keeps coming back and back through this book, this bird singing the five opening notes of 'Für Elise' in very different moments in my life and in this book. And yes, indeed-I don't know. I don't know what to say. It's just there.

Ramona Koval: There's also something kind of Old Testament about this book, too; recounting this person who begat this person, who begat this person ... it's from a big tradition of the story of the Jews.

Amos Oz: That is a great need, to tell my children and my grandchildren-where do we really come from. Precisely that which my parents tried to censor from me for their embarrassment and humiliation and uneasiness. They were ashamed. they were ashamed to tell their child how unwanted they were. Now that's universally true, not only of European Jews or east European Jews. This is true of my Iraqi-Jewish friends who are embarrassed or were embarrassed for decades to talk about the circumstances of their expulsion from Iraq. Or those who were expelled by the Arabs from north Africa or from Egypt.

It's coming out recently, not only in this book, but in various different suburbs or outskirts of contemporary Hebrew literature. We are getting more and more family tales which are amazingly similar, not in anything but in this one respect: some kind of longstanding censorship is being banned and the true character of Israel as a multi-background refugee camp, or a life-raft-is surfacing now that gone is the need to pretend that we are the macho of the world or we are the mightiest-at least in literature-or we are the new kind of careless, unworried, un-neurotic, uncomplicated Jews. This need to present this façade is gone in the literature. And it's gone in various parts of the literature and it opens up the family stories which were suppressed for so long in so many Israeli families.

Ramona Koval: There's a moment which is truly shocking, I think, for me to read, about the survivors who came back after the war and tried to make a life in Israel. And you describe a neighbour of yours, who is a survivor, who's a very horrific kind of character who's a feared character. Can you talk about that-because it seems to me there's such pity in that story.

Amos Oz: There was a man who must have been the only survivor of his family. Very scary-looking man. Perhaps not entirely sane after all the horrors he must have been through. And he had a little hole in the wall which in daytime was a drycleaning and a laundrette. In nighttime he unfolded his mattress and he slept, and lived and cooked there. That was his place. And most of the day he would sit on a little stool in front of his hole in the wall, waiting for customers. And each time he will see us children, he will not say, but almost spit at us, in a Polish accent, with hatred: 'A million children. A million children died, like you. They're butchers.' We kids, who did not even know what he was talking about, we called him 'a million children'. That was his nickname.

But he was always pointing his finger at us, accusing us of being alive. What have you kids done to deserve to be alive when a million other kids like you were killed? How dare you be alive. Why do you deserve to be alive? What do you have to say to justify the fact that you are alive? All of this we couldn't understand, or decipher. But the vibrations, the anger, the bitterness, the despair. The, if you wish, the psychopathology-this was in the air.

Ramona Koval: And not just him, but others like him, didn't really find a comfortable place in the new country. They weren't the new Jews, were they?

Amos Oz: The new Jews, yes. The new Jews existed beyond the horizon. they were in the kibbutzim, they were in the moshavim, they were suntanned, they were uncomplicated, they were driving tractors, they were repelling our Arab captors, they were supermen, and they came right out of the wild west. they were the John Wayne type of a Jew. I believed in them. We all believed that they existed.

Until I finally moved to a kibbutz and discovered that they are as argumentative, as talkative, as quarrelsome-as my parents. Except they were suntanned. And the subjects of the arguments were slightly different, but they were still in the business of finding a verbal combination for instant universal solution and for resolving everything. They were forever resolving, in the kibbutz as well as in Jerusalem. The Jewish-Arab question, the Zionist question, the male-female question-everything. They were resolving. Except they couldn't even tie their shoelaces properly. And when they had to pronounce the word 'woman', the men would blush. Just because they pronounced 'woman' or 'legs' or 'breastfeeding'. They would blush. They would say 'legs' and blush. The world reformers who make speeches about free love and the need to reconsider the entire institution of marriage and perhaps reopen the relationship between the sexes-but they couldn't pronounce the Hebrew word 'legs' without blushing immediately.

Ramona Koval: You tell a couple of stories about relationships with Arabs in Jerusalem in your neighbourhood. The first story is about being lost in a shop and being rescued.

Amos Oz: Yes, it was an Arab shop, an Arab clothing shop. I was taken there by my minder, who was a measuring freak. I never saw her buying any clothes, but she would measure. She would take me and measure and measure and measure, and I had to wait for her. Like a fat Aphrodite, she would come out of the measuring box wearing this or that and asking for my little judgment, whether this dress or this fur coat or this ... So one day I got-it's a long story; I'll cut it short-I got lost in the huge jungle of tree trunks of clothes in the store. Revolving treet runks. It was a jungle; exotic. Full of unknown odours and flavours. Full of lingerie the such of which I've never seen before and not for many years after.

It was a very exotic place, and I couldn't find my way, and I saw a midget, which gave me a terrible scare, and I just got lost and hid in a space under some fur capes, couldn't get out and was rescued by a very fatherly Arab employee, who I'll never forget, and who to this very day-I don't know his name, I don't know his destiny-but his existence brings tears to my eyes, not because he was an Arab and I was a little Jewish boy, but because he was fatherly in a way in which my own father had never been. I cannot repeat the entire description in the book.

But for years and years and years, the question, what happened to this man-is he rotting in one of those dreadful refugee camps after '48? Has he lost his home and everything? What have I to do with this? Is it true that in 1948 it was either him or us? Did it have to happen the way it did happen, or not? So I implied guilt but not necessarily sin. We Jews are the world champions in suffering the agonies of guilt without enjoying the delights of sin first.I

am not going, right now, into the Israeli-Arab issues. We have talked about this and we will talk about this, but tonight we are focusing around this book. It is not a black-and-white issue in this novel. It is not a black-and-white issue in politics. It's not a black-and-white issue in my own emotion. I have not entirely sorted it out in a way many ideologists have sorted it out by taking sides and happily going to sleep afterwards. I think it is a dreadful, tragic clash between two very powerful, very convincing claims, which are almost mutually exclusive. Such a tragic clash can either be resolved by a painful, clenched-teeth compromise, or by a terrible bloodbath. And I have been opting for a compromise. I am a man of compromises. This is a book about the need to compromise.

Ramona Koval: So ... there are many things in a life. You're getting more mature now. You're almost grown up, probably, and there are many things you could have selected from your life to write about. So this was an important thing for you to select. In a literary vein, too.

Amos Oz: You know, I didn't write this novel as a kind of self therapy. I have written it when I came to be past the point of being angry-with my parents or with myself or with my background or with my world. It's a book of reconciliation. I said this yesterday morning and I still agree with myself today, although it's not always the case with me. This book is a part of a peace process with myself. For years and years and years I was furiously angry with my mother for just walking away like this. Without even saying goodbye. Without leaving me an explanatory note. She who always, always insisted that if I go out of the house for more than half an hour, I leave a note in a set place, under the flower vase, always telling where I am and when am I coming back. And that was a rule of the house. My father, my mother, myself-anyone who walks for more than half an hour leaves a note.

Suddenly she walks out. She says nothing and she walks out, not for half an hour, but for longer and longer. I could not initially digest for how long. So I was hugely angry, on my behalf and on behalf of my father. I felt as if she ran away with another man. As if she betrayed my father and me and she ran away with a lover. I didn't have the slightest compassion for her suffering. I had all the compassion in the world for the sufferings of my father; but not for hers.

Then it changed. I grew angry with my father. This idiot lost the best woman in the world. How could he lose my love? He must have done something terrible enough to cause her to walk away. Then the anger switched and was turned against myself. There must be something very, very terrible with me, if my mother just walked out and walked away from me. Every mother, not only in the human world, even in the realm of the living, among animals-loves its pets or its cubs or its babies. Except for me. So something must have been terribly wrong with me. If I had only remembered to properly hang my shirt on the hanger, she'd still be here. If I'd taken my dishes to the sink. If I'll take the garbage out she will still be here. It's just me, because I have been unruly and difficult.

So years and years of rotating anger. And then despair, and then disbelief. And then a certain urge to think about other things. When all of this was over, and I could think about both of them with empathy and I could think or write about my parents in a 'parently' way, I could write this book. Beyond the anger, beyond the disbelief, with a certain curiosity and without any urge to point my finger at him or at her or at me-without looking for the guilty party.

Ramona Koval: You turned yourself into another person when you were angry with your mother; you were angry with your father-so Amos Klausner becomes Amos Oz. You chose this name. Tell me why you chose that last name.

Amos Oz: Oz means courage, strength and determination. Everything I needed very badly and didn't really possess. When I decided to rebel against my father's world and move to live in kibbutz school at the age of fourteen-and-a-half or fifteen. So I decided to get born anew. I will be everything that my parents were not, and I will not be anything that they were. In fact I came to the kibbutz with three cardinal decisions about my life. One, I'll never write again. Not a single line. Two, I'll never masturbate again. Never. Not once. Three, I'll get suntanned in three days. Suntanned like those bronzed kibbutz boys. All three decisions turned out to be either a disaster, or an impossibility.

But the name Oz came to really whistle in the dark and encourage myself. You can make it. You can do it. You can overcome. You can be born anew. You can become someone else. You can become someone else. Now this is ironic, because in a sense, when my parents came from Europe to Jerusalem, they wanted to become different. They even internalised some of the European spite and hatred for Jews. They said something must be wrong with us, we have to change. Shut up and work on the land. Years later, I said something must be wrong with my parents. I have to change. I have to be born again. I have to be different.

Now I look at all of this, and this is really the tune of this book, with compassion, with humour, and with endless curiosity. Endless curiosity. Because in a sense this is a universal comedy of immigrants wherever they are. Whether they are Jewish, European Jews or Middle Eastern Jews in Jerusalem. Or West Indies or Pakistanis here in Britain. Or Hispanos in the United States-any immigrants. People who leave behind the language they would like to forget but they will never forget. They come to a promised land where they expect to find paradise but they will never find a paradise. Very soon they discover that their own hopes are not going to be fulfilled, and they place the entire yoke, weight, of their frustrated hopes on the children.

And so the immigrant family becomes a kind of Cape Canaveral and the children-in my case the one child-becomes the missile, the rocket, which will have to take the family ambitions sky-high. And the whole family is no more than the launching pad. The whole immigrant family. This is universal, not local. And this is both comic and tragic, the same. And as I said yesterday, in writing this book, I wrote from the perspective that the comic and the tragic are not two planets. they are not two worlds. they are not even two attitudes. They are just two different windows through which we can observe the same landscape, the same backyards of our lives.

And so I write A Tale of Love and Darkness, hoping not to make my readers smile on one page and perhaps shed a tear or empathise on the next; but both at the same time. It's a non-judgmental book. It's a book about the human comi-tragedy, or tragi-comedy.

Ramona Koval: Well, I must tell you that I laughed and cried when I read this book. It's a very wonderful, moving book. And I could talk to you for another five hours about all the things that I haven't mentioned yet, but I think you'll agree with me that there are many, many questions that have arisen and answers that might be possible. A Tale of Love and Darkness, is Amos Oz's book, which I would recommend to you. And he will sign it for you. And I've had a lovely time. I'm sure you have too. Please thank Amos Oz.