A child of Kerem Avraham
Amos Oz was born Amos Klausner on May 4, 1939, in Jerusalem, then under the British Mandate, and grew up in a small flat in Kerem Avraham, a poor neighbourhood of scholars, clerks and refugees. He was the only child of two immigrants who had met as students at the Hebrew University. His father, Yehuda Arieh Klausner, came from a Lithuanian Jewish family, had studied history and literature in Vilnius and dreamed of a professorship in comparative literature; he never achieved it and spent most of his working life as a librarian at the Jewish National and University Library. His mother, Fania Mussman, the cultured daughter of a mill owner from Rivne, had studied history and philosophy at Charles University in Prague before her family’s fortunes collapsed in the Depression.
The household was crowded with languages and books. His parents spoke Russian or Polish to each other and read in many more, but they were never fully at home in Hebrew, and Hebrew was the only language they allowed their son to learn. The family leaned to the right-wing Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky, and its most imposing figure was Oz’s great-uncle Joseph Klausner, the Hebrew University scholar whose book-lined home and literary salons fascinated the boy. As a six-year-old, by his own later account, Amos already announced on his bedroom door that he was an author.
Darkness, and a new name
The family was not religious, though Amos attended the religious Tachkemoni school, the alternative, a Labour movement school, was even less acceptable to his parents, where one of his teachers was the poet Zelda. He went on to the Gymnasia Rehavia. Around him, the last years of the Mandate, the 1948 war and the birth of the state played out in the streets of Jerusalem, while relatives in Lithuania were murdered in the Holocaust, an event Oz would call the most significant of his life.
Inside the flat there was another darkness. His mother suffered from deep depression, and in January 1952, when Amos was twelve, she took her own life. The loss shaped everything that followed. In his mid-teens he rebelled against his father’s world, left Jerusalem for Kibbutz Hulda, joined the Labour Zionist movement he had been raised to distrust, and changed his surname to Oz, Hebrew for strength or courage. He later joked that he had been a disaster as a farm labourer, the joke of the kibbutz; the kibbutz, for its part, at first allowed him a single day a week for writing.
Soldier, student, teacher
Oz did his military service in the Nahal Brigade, taking part in border skirmishes with Syria. Afterwards Hulda sent him to the Hebrew University, where he studied philosophy and Hebrew literature, graduating in 1963. He returned to teach at the kibbutz high school and kept writing. As a reservist he served in a tank unit in Sinai during the Six-Day War of 1967 and on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, experiences that informed his lifelong conviction that war is sometimes unavoidable and always a catastrophe.
In 1960 he married Nily Zuckerman; they had three children, Fania, Galia and Daniel. The family lived on the kibbutz until 1986, when they moved to the desert town of Arad in the Negev for the sake of Daniel’s asthma. In 1987 Oz became a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and he held visiting posts at Oxford and at universities in the United States.
My Michael and the New Wave
Oz’s first book, the story collection Where the Jackals Howl, appeared in 1965, followed by the kibbutz novel Elsewhere, Perhaps. In 1968 came My Michael, the story of a young Jerusalem woman, Hannah, slowly suffocating in a decent, dull marriage while her imagination fills with dreams of violence and two Arab twins from her childhood. It was a bestseller and a scandal, one critic complained that no nice Jewish girl would dream of an Arab, and it established Oz as a leading figure of the Israeli “New Wave” of the 1960s alongside A. B. Yehoshua, Amalia Kahana-Carmon and Aharon Appelfeld.
Over the following decades he averaged almost a book a year: Unto Death, The Hill of Evil Counsel, A Perfect Peace, Black Box, To Know a Woman, Fima, Don’t Call It Night, the verse novel The Same Sea, Scenes from Village Life and the children’s book Soumchi. His subject, he liked to say, was families, and if given two words, unhappy families. He credited a Hebrew translation of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio with teaching him that the place where a writer stands, however small, can be the centre of the universe. He wrote of kibbutzniks and Jerusalem clerks with realism, irony and a tenderness that did not exclude criticism, and his royalties went into the kibbutz’s common budget for as long as he lived there.
A Tale of Love and Darkness
His masterpiece came late. A Tale of Love and Darkness, published in Hebrew in 2002, is a memoir that reads like a great novel: a portrait of Jerusalem in the 1940s and early 1950s, of a family of disappointed European intellectuals, of the Klausner and Mussman ancestors, of the birth of the state, and, at its heart, of his mother’s decline and death, which he had never been able to write about directly before. It became one of the most widely read books in modern Hebrew, was named in 2007 among the ten most important books since Israel’s founding, and in 2015 was filmed by Natalie Portman, who directed and played Fania.
In 2007 a selection from the book’s Chinese translation became the first work of modern Hebrew literature to appear in an official Chinese textbook. His last novel, Judas (2014), returned to Jerusalem in the winter of 1959–60 to question the Christian image of the Jew as traitor and the label of “traitor” in politics; it was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. In all, Oz published some 40 books, novels, stories, children’s books and essays, translated into some 45 languages, more than any other Israeli writer.
The conscience of the Zionist left
Oz was never only a novelist. Shortly after the Six-Day War, in a 1967 article in the Labour daily Davar, he became one of the first Israelis to argue for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, warning that occupation would corrupt the occupier. In 1978 he was among the founders of Peace Now, and he remained one of its best-known voices. He welcomed the Oslo Accords, opposed the settlements, and argued that the conflict was not a holy war but, in his phrase, a real-estate dispute between two peoples with genuine claims to the same land, to be ended by a painful compromise, in effect a divorce, which he compared to the peaceful separation of the Czechs and Slovaks.
Yet he always called himself a Zionist and sharply attacked the anti-Zionist left. He supported Israel’s war against Hezbollah in 2006 at its outset as self-defence, later criticising its expansion; he backed military action against Hamas in Gaza before calling for a ceasefire. In 2011 he sent the imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti an Arabic translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness with a dedication hoping to meet him in peace, a gesture that drew fierce criticism from the Israeli right. His essays, from In the Land of Israel (1983), a book of interviews with Israelis and Palestinians of every stripe, to How to Cure a Fanatic and Dear Zealots, made him one of the most widely read Israeli commentators abroad.
An atheist of the book
Oz described himself as an “atheist of the book.” For him, Jewish heritage was first and foremost a heritage of texts, a civilisation of arguments, commentaries and stories rather than of belief. He explored that idea in Jews and Words (2012), written with his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger, a historian, which argued that Jewish continuity has been carried less by blood or faith than by the transmission of books and questions across generations.
His Jewish experience was that of the generation that turned the Hebrew of scripture into a living, colloquial language. His parents had been ill at ease in it; he became one of its great modern stylists and said he felt for the language what he perhaps did not feel for the country. His outrage at fanaticism of every kind, religious, nationalist, political, drew on the family memory of European persecution and on what he saw at home.
The private man
To admirers Oz was warm, witty and endlessly quotable, a gifted public speaker who was courted by prime ministers, who, he liked to say, never took his advice. His public image was complicated after his death. In 2021 his daughter Galia published a memoir accusing him of physical and emotional abuse during her childhood. His widow and his other children rejected the account, describing a warm and loving father, and in 2022 his son Daniel published a book defending him. The allegations remain disputed.
Last years and legacy
Oz and Nily moved to Tel Aviv in 2014. His essay collection Dear Zealots appeared shortly before his death from cancer on December 28, 2018, at the age of 79; he was buried at Kibbutz Hulda. His honours included the Brenner and Bialik prizes, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1992), the French Legion of Honour, the Israel Prize for Literature (1998), the Goethe Prize (2005), the Prince of Asturias Award (2007) and the Franz Kafka Prize (2013).
His legacy is double. As a writer he carried the private lives of ordinary Israelis, lonely wives, kibbutz idealists, grieving fathers, into world literature, and in A Tale of Love and Darkness he gave the founding of Israel a human face as intimate as any family story. As a public figure he insisted, for half a century and often against the mood of his country, that Israelis and Palestinians would one day have to share the land, and that the cure for fanaticism begins with curiosity about the other side’s story.
Sources & further reading
Amos Oz, Wikipedia · Amos Oz obituary, The Guardian (Julia Pascal, 2018) · Amos Oz, Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.