English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Living in Darkness

Amos Oz.  A Tale of Love and Darkness.  Trans. Nicholas de Lange.  London: Chatto & Windus, 2003.  517pp. 

By Kate McLoughlin, University of Oxford

Amos Oz’s mother had this advice for him:

Nobody knows anything about anyone else […] not even about the person you’re married to.  Or about your parent or your child. […] And if we sometimes imagine for an instant that we do know something after all, that’s even worse, because it’s better to live without knowing anything than to live in error.  Although in fact, who knows?  Maybe on second thoughts it’s much easier to live in error than to live in darkness. (150)

The darkness of unknowability pervades these poignant and often funny memoirs, an uneasy darkness that the reader senses from the opening description of the writer’s childhood home, a dimly-lit basement in post-war Jerusalem.  And the reader knows quite well what the darkness is: the writer’s mother’s suicide, when she was 38 and he twelve and a half.

            There are other darknesses, of course: secrets (‘What’s the matter with you?  You can see the boy’s just there!’ Oz’s parents would rebuke each other in Russian when speaking of things they did not want their son to hear); missing places; millions of missing people; repressed emotions; escape routes; the gloomy mists of wooded Europe, original home of Oz’s father (Odessa and Vilna) and mother (Rovno), ‘a yearned-for landscape of […] forests and snow-covered meadows’ (2).  And there is also light, but this is the ‘harsh, uncompromising blue’ (295) light of the Land (Israel) which withers the family’s attempts to cultivate a vegetable patch and forces unwanted things into the open.  Oz’s mother, sensitive to light, suffers from the harsh glare: ‘the desert light banishes ghosts and dispels any memory of fir forests and misty autumns’ (297).

            The memoirs themselves are a chiaroscuro of similar light and darkness.  The light is in the illuminating detail, provided in encyclopaedic abundance, as though the 65-year-old Oz’s aim is to preserve forever every last fact about that long-ago part of his life.  So there are descriptions of what the family ate and recreations of their shopping lists.  (The list, indeed, is a key feature of Oz’s prose: Uncle Joseph’s languages, the writer’s own reading matter, the smells of the city – and, best of all, the elements which combine to create the ‘dreary tangle of sadness and pretence, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity’ that is where the writer comes from (472).)  A matter-of-fact tone is the equivalent of a searchlight beam in accounts of the simply unbearable: ‘in two days […] Germans and their collaborators murdered more than twenty-three thousand of the city’s Jews’ (147).  There are well-lit portraits – Oz’s scholar uncle, Joseph Klausner, surrounded by his library of 25,000 volumes; Grandma Shlomit (‘the Levant is full of germs’); Uncle Staszek and Auntie Mala with their cage containing one ancient, bald bird and another bird made from a painted pine cone – portraits drawn with skill, affection and masterly humour.  Particularly moving is the impression which emerges of Oz’s relationship with his father.  Arieh Klausner is an unworldly scholar-manqué, at once disappointed in his son and proud of him; they talk as equals and they don’t talk at all; their handwriting grows identical and then different again; Oz calls him ‘Daddy’ and then rejects his name.  But despite these riches, there hangs over the pages a sense of incomplete commitment – or is it apprehension?  Something, far more important, is still waiting to be said.

            Centripetal, the memoirs circle closer and closer to the darkness.  ‘I simply can’t talk about her directly,’ says Oz’s Aunt Sonia of her sister, ‘only in a roundabout way.  Otherwise the wound starts to hurt’ (176).  This is Oz’s method too.  When a section arrives on his present life in the desert town of Arad and he begins to question the writing process – ‘Contribute? Progress?’ he asks, seemingly adrift – circuitousness begins to resemble reluctance, as though the writer’s will to write has simply flagged.  But this is how his mother’s stories – the two of them sat at night together like Peer Gynt and Ǻse – worked too: they ‘did not begin at the beginning or conclude with a happy ending but they flickered in the half-light, wound round themselves, emerged from the mists for a moment […] then disappeared back into the darkness’ (261).

            ‘I was a word-child,’ Oz says (282).  Growing up surrounded by ‘forests of words […] meadows of words’ (134), it nonetheless appears that words in fact prevented – or helped – him from saying what really had to be said.  He began writing as a form of escapism, not wanting to confront the possibility that his father was having an affair at the end of his mother’s life.  And in these memoirs, the ‘word-child’ – aided by Nicholas de Lange’s excellent translation – shows off all his fine skill.  Particularly brilliant are his accounts of playing with a steel tape-measure; of the crowd waiting to hear the United Nations’ vote on creating the Jewish State; of ‘feeling’ his father’s tears that night in the darkness; of a terrifying meeting with David Ben-Gurion.   The passage describing the sensations involved in putting on one’s first shoe might be the best on the subject in all literature.       

              But all the time the atmosphere is darkening.  There are fewer jokes; Oz turns less and less to the humorous third-person characterisation of himself as ‘the child’.  In the last section, the darkness finally arrives.  The facts are told swiftly, as though it was scarcely bearable to write them.  Oz’s mother’s death occurs as the infant State of Israel debates whether or not to accept German reparations.  As his father throws her possessions away, Oz watches, wondering if Christian onlookers felt like this as their Jewish neighbours were taken away by force and crammed into cattle trucks (509).  It’s the most potent image he could have used and it aligns his mother’s memory with the six million dead.  Hence the need, in the final pages, to turn the light on, to illuminate the darkness’s searing glare.