Amos Oz's memoir became a modern Hebrew classic

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

The story

For decades Amos Oz could not write directly about the central loss of his life. His mother, Fania, a sensitive and cultured woman from Rivne who had studied in Prague, suffered from severe depression and took her own life in January 1952, when he was twelve. Oz never discussed it with his father and did not write about it publicly. Two years later he left Jerusalem for Kibbutz Hulda and changed his name from Klausner to Oz.

In 2002 he finally told the story in A Tale of Love and Darkness, a long memoir of his childhood in Jerusalem in the last years of the British Mandate and the first years of the State of Israel. The love and darkness of the title refer above all to his mother. Told out of sequence, the book weaves together his family's roots in Lithuania and Ukraine, a family history researched by his great-uncle, the 1948 war and the birth of the state with an intimate portrait of his parents' marriage. As a boy he crossed paths with S. Y. Agnon, Saul Tchernichovsky and David Ben-Gurion, and the poet Zelda was one of his teachers.

Readers and critics embraced it. The Guardian's reviewer called it the biggest-selling literary work in Israeli history. It won the JQ Wingate Prize in 2005, was translated into 28 languages and sold more than a million copies. In 2007 it was named one of the ten most important books published since the creation of the State of Israel, and a selection from its Chinese translation entered an official textbook in China.

The book also crossed political lines. A Palestinian Israeli lawyer, Elias Khoury, whose father and son had both been killed in the conflict, paid for its translation into Arabic so that Arab readers could better understand the Jewish story of national rebirth.

In 2015 Natalie Portman directed, co-wrote and starred in a Hebrew-language film adaptation, playing Oz's mother, with Amir Tessler as the young Amos. It was her debut as a feature director and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, bringing the story to a new international audience.

Why it matters

The memoir gave readers around the world an intimate, human picture of Israel's founding years through the eyes of one family, and has helped readers on both sides of the conflict understand each other.