Amos Oz was the first Hebrew writer in a Chinese textbook

Person: Amos Oz
Lived: 1939–2018
Field: Novelist and essayist
From: Israeli

The story

Modern Hebrew literature is young. For centuries Hebrew was mainly a sacred language of prayer and study. Only from the end of the nineteenth century, through the work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Jewish immigrants who settled in Ottoman Palestine, did it become a spoken and written language of daily life. There is no other example of a sacred language becoming a national language with millions of native speakers.

Amos Oz grew up in the middle of that revival. Born in Jerusalem in 1939, he was the only child of immigrants from Eastern Europe who were highly cultured and spoke many languages. His father claimed he could read sixteen or seventeen, and his mother read seven or eight, yet neither was comfortable speaking Hebrew. They spoke Russian or Polish to each other, but the only language they allowed their son to learn was Hebrew. He became one of its finest modern writers.

His memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, published in Hebrew in 2002, tells that story. It describes his childhood in Jerusalem in the last years of the British Mandate and the early years of the state, his family's European roots and the suicide of his mother when he was twelve. It became the biggest-selling literary work in Israeli history, was translated into 28 languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide.

In 2007 a selection from its Chinese translation was included in an official textbook in China, the first time any work of modern Hebrew literature had appeared in one. That same year the book was named one of the ten most important books published since the founding of the State of Israel.

The memoir kept finding new readers. An Arabic translation was paid for by Elias Khoury, a Palestinian Israeli lawyer who had lost his father and his son to violence, to help Arab readers understand the Jewish national story, and a bootleg Kurdish edition turned up in northern Iraq. For a language that had been revived within living memory, reaching Chinese classrooms was a striking sign of how far it had travelled in Oz's lifetime.