Amos Oz, The Art of Fiction No.

148
Interviewed by Shusha Guppy

Issue 140, Fall 1996

Amos Oz lives in Arad, a small new town of twenty-two thousand inhabitants, built in 1961
in the Negev Desert. To reach him, I took the bus from Jerusalem to Beersheba, then
another to Arad. At the bus station everyone knew his house, and a man directed me to it:
uphill along a wide tree-lined road flanked with medium-sized apartment buildings in white
sandstone, to the top, where rows of family houses back onto the desert in lateral streets.
Roses and huge feathery chrysanthemums grow in his front garden, shaded by a peppertree.

Inside, the house is simply furnished and welcoming. Stairs lead from the sitting room to
Oz’s study below: a tidy, womblike room, entirely lined with books, like wallpaper. One
long shelf contains dozens of Oz’s own books, in various editions and translations. A
comfortable sofa and armchair in gray velveteen, a coffee table, a large desk, and a lectern
in one corner complete the furniture. Patio windows open onto a small beautiful garden,
like a bower, with rosebushes and shrubs, overhung with plumbagos. Beyond is the desert.
“I’m proud of my garden,” he said. “I created it. There is no topsoil here, so it had to be
brought specially.”

Amos Oz speaks perfect English, with a slight accent. The clipped, well-rounded sentences,
clearly enunciated, indicate the punctuation, as if he were writing. He was born Amos
Klausner in 1939 to a family of scholars who had emigrated from Russia in the early 1920s
and later settled in Jerusalem. At fifteen he left home for Kibbutz Hulda, where he lived
until a few years ago, when his younger son’s asthma made the move to Arad necessary—
the clean desert air alleviates his condition. Oz studied philosophy and literature at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem and later fought as a reserve soldier in the 1967 Six-Day War in
Sinai and on the Golan Heights in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Apart from a dozen novels
and some collections of short stories, he has published three books of essays, mostly
concerned with the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is one of the earliest activists of the Peace Now
movement, advocating a compromise between the two communities based on mutual
acceptance and cooperation, and the sharing of land.

When he began to publish his work he took the name Oz, meaning strength. He met his
wife Nily at the kibbutz, when they were both fifteen. They have two daughters who have
grown up and married, and a teenage son—“the child of our old age”—who lives with
them. Nily runs the International Artists’ Colony in Arad, where artists from all over the
world live and work for a period of eight months.

Amos Oz is a professor of Hebrew literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in

Beersheba, and has been visiting professor at universities in Britain and the United States.
He is much in demand for lectures and conferences, last year traveling to several European
countries—France, Poland, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, among others.
"He looks like Mel Gibson,” his London publisher suggested. Oz has turquoise-blue eyes,
short blondish hair, and a gentle smile. His courtesy and courtly manners, his acute
intelligence and knowledge, made the afternoon I spent with him a delight. It took place in
December 1994. 

INTERVIEWER

Your traveling schedule is formidable. Yet you produce books at regular intervals. How do
you divide your time? First during the year, and then daily?

AMOS OZ

The first rule is never to travel when I’m pregnant with a book. I tend not to travel abroad
when I’m writing, and even within this country I limit myself to three or four times a year.
It doesn’t always work out, but that is my pattern. As for my day, I start at six a.m. with a
forty-minute walk in the desert, summer and winter.

INTERVIEWER

Does it ever snow in the desert?

OZ

Oh yes, every two or three years. And then you should see the expression on the faces of
the camels crossing the desert! That is when I understand the real meaning of the word
bewilderment! But even without snow, it is bitterly cold in winter, a savage place at dawn,
when stormy winds seem determined to sweep away the whole town into the desert. But
walking alone knocks things into proportion. If later on I read in the morning papers that
some politician has said this or that will never happen, I know that this or that is going to
last forever, that the stones out there are laughing, that in this desert, which is unchanged
for thousands of years, a politician’s never is like . . . a month? Six months? Thirty years?
Completely insignificant.

I then have my coffee and come down to this room, sit at my desk, and wait. Without
reading, listening to music, or answering the phone. Then I write, sometimes a sentence,
sometimes a paragraph—in a good day, half a page. But I am here at least seven or eight
hours every day. I used to feel guilty about an unproductive morning, especially when I
lived on the kibbutz, and everyone else was working—plowing fields, milking cows,
planting trees. Now I think of my work as that of a shopkeeper: it is my job to open up in
the morning, sit, and wait for customers. If I get some, it is a blessed morning, if not, well,
I’m still doing my job. So the guilt has gone, and I try to stick to my shopkeeper’s routine.
Chores like answering letters, faxes, and telephone calls are squeezed in an hour before
lunch or dinner.
Perhaps poets and short-story writers can work with a different pattern. But writing novels
is a very disciplined business. Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a
short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage—one has to be cunning,
devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

INTERVIEWER

What about the evenings? Arad doesn’t seem crackling with exciting nightlife. It seems fast
asleep even on this sunny afternoon.

OZ

Don’t you believe it! It is an exciting little place: three restaurants and three banks, a brand-
new shopping mall, a barbershop, and a bookstore. We have had an influx of overqualified
Russian Jews in recent years. We say that if a Russian arrives who is not carrying a violin,
it’s only because he or she is a pianist. So we have good concerts.

Sometimes I come down here after dinner and read what I have written during the day. I
demolish mercilessly, to start again the next morning. Sometimes I go out and sit myself at
the local parliament: a couple of benches at the café where people argue about the meaning
of life, the significance of history, or the real intention of God, and that’s my favorite
pastime.

INTERVIEWER

When do you fit in your journalism?

OZ

I write articles not because I’m asked to, but because I’m filled with rage. I feel I have to
tell my government what to do and, sometimes, where to go. Not that they listen. Then I
drop everything and write an essay, which is always published here first, then picked up by
The New York Times, or England’s Guardian or another publication. You see, I’m not a
political analyst or commentator. I write from a sense of injustice and my revolt against it.
But I can write an article only when I agree with myself one hundred percent, which is not
my normal condition—normally I’m in partial disagreement with myself and can identify
with three or five different views and different feelings about the same issue. That is when I
write a story, where different characters can express different views on the same subject. I
have never written a story or a novel to make people change their minds about anything—
not once. When I need to do this, I write an essay, or an article. I even use two different
pens, as a symbolic gesture: one to tell stories, the other to tell the government what to do
with itself. Both, by the way, are very ordinary ballpoint pens, which I change every three
weeks or so.

Unlike stories, articles are written in one burst, over six or seven hours. It is like having a
quarrel with my wife—we scream and shout and later make up. We live in a Fellini movie,
not an Ingmar Bergman one: anything is better than silence and sulking and making each
other feel guilty. I act upon the same principle in politics.

INTERVIEWER

How do you write? Standing at that lectern, like Hemingway, or sitting down? Do you
write in longhand or with a word processor?

OZ

I write in longhand. That machine on my desk [a word processor] is for typing out, not
composing. For years I had my portable typewriter on which I typed the final draft, so that
others could read it. Now I do the same on the word processor. I don’t even edit on it, but
rewrite and rewrite in longhand. After many drafts I finally type it out. The word processor
is, for me, nothing but a typewriter, only you don’t have to use Typex to erase or correct a
mistake.

I walk round the room, then stand by the lectern and put down a sentence, and walk round
again. I sway between the desk and the lectern.

INTERVIEWER

You have chosen to write in Hebrew, which is important for two reasons. The first is that it
is the official language and therefore bound with the national identity . . .

OZ

Oh no, I have never chosen Hebrew. I was born into it. It is my native tongue. I dream and
laugh and curse in Hebrew. And I have said many times that I’m a chauvinist only in
respect of the language, and that even if I had to part with this country, I would never part
with the language. I feel for the language everything that perhaps I don’t always feel for the
country.

INTERVIEWER

The second reason is that Hebrew is a sacred language, a language of revelation, a language
in which God has spoken, like Arabic and Sanskrit. It is both a challenge and a
responsibility to use it. Yet modern Hebrew is said to be only a hundred years old, and has
been invented by poets like Bialik and other early writers. Could you not have written in
English?

OZ

No, I could not. Hebrew is the language in which I think, count, laugh, and make love. It is
part of my being. But you are right, as a spoken language it was as dead as ancient Greek or
Latin. It had an old literature, and a medieval literature, but no everyday currency. It was
used for religious rituals and scholarly exchanges among Jews of various countries. It also
had some high-flown poetry written in the Middle Ages by Jews in Muslim Spain who
loved Hebrew but didn’t speak it in everyday life.

So Hebrew was revived here a hundred years ago, but not as a result of an ideological
decision, which cannot be done—no argument or decision could make the Canadians
suddenly start speaking Korean or Japanese. The reason why Hebrew was revived here is
because it was the only language the Jews coming from all over the world had in common.
The Oriental Jews spoke Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Ladino (a Spanish dialect), while the
European Jews spoke Yiddish, Russian, Polish. The only language in which they could
communicate—to ask directions in the street, to rent a flat or a shop—was the prayer book
Hebrew.

But for me the revival of Hebrew occurred when the first boy said to the first girl “I love
you” in Hebrew. Or was it the girl who said it to the boy? This had not happened for
seventeen centuries. I hope that boy and girl had their way with each other and lived
happily ever after—they deserved to, for having revived the language. Yet it couldn’t have
happened if there had not already existed a significant body of literature in Hebrew, a
literature that contained, surprisingly, several modern sensibilities. People like Bialik,
Brenner, Berdichevsky, Mendele—names that mean nothing to you or your readers—but
I’m standing on their shoulders.

On the other hand, Hebrew is like a volcano, like Elizabethan English. I’m not implying
that our poets are all Shakespeare, rather that the language is erupting like a volcano; it is
happening all the time. So writing in Hebrew is a wonderful challenge.

You said it is the language of revelation. You are right. Think of playing a piece of
chamber music inside a cathedral—you have to be very careful with the acoustics,
otherwise you may produce a lot of echoes you don’t want. You have to use words that
have prophetic and mystical connotations to describe a little pocket-money disagreement
between parents and children. You don’t want to bring in Isaiah and Psalms and Mount
Sinai. So you are always tiptoeing on a minefield. If sometimes you want to produce an
explosion, then it is easily done—by introducing a weighty word in the middle of a prosaic
sentence. I have a feeling that I work with a wonderful musical instrument.

INTERVIEWER

The creation of an academy at the inception of the State of Israel must have helped bring
the language up to date, making it adequate for expressing what you call “modern
sensibilities.” Do you think it was important? Or would the language have evolved
anyway?

OZ

It was important to establish Hebrew. There was first a committee, which later became the
Academy of Hebrew Language, of which I’m a proud member. It deals with the need to
create modern terminology, but cannot, of course, control the language, which as I said is
like a gushing crater, with an organic life of its own.

INTERVIEWER

There are other famous modern Hebrew writers: the Nobel Prize winner S. Y. Agnon, A. B.
Yehoshua, David Grossman, among others. It seems that writers are taken very seriously in
this country. In the West commercial considerations play an important role. As a result,
Shelley’s claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” seems to
apply here more than with us. Is that the case?

OZ

We have a somewhat different tradition. In the West, at least in English-speaking countries,

writers, even great writers and poets, are usually regarded primarily as entertainers. They
can be fine, subtle, deep, but still they are entertainers. Even Shakespeare is regarded as a
magnificent, perhaps the greatest, entertainer. By contrast, in the Judeo-Slavic tradition,
writers are regarded as prophets. This can be a terrible burden, for unlike the prophets I
don’t hear voices from above, and I don’t think I’m any more equipped to be a prophet—to
foresee the future or serve as the people’s conscience—than an American or a British
writer. Yet there is a huge expectation here, and so it is also in Russia or Poland.

Perhaps we can start to examine the word fiction, which does not exist in Hebrew. The
academy has invented bidayon to translate the English word, but in bookstores you won’t
find my works or any other novelist’s under that title. You will find them under the title
siporet, which means narrative prose. That is a bit more decent, because fiction has a ring
of lying about it, the opposite of truth. In my view this is nonsense: why should James
Joyce, who took the trouble of literally measuring how many steps there were between the
bar and the mailbox on the street corner, or Tolstoy, who studied the minutest details of the
Battle of Borodino, be regarded as fiction writers, while the most banal journalist using
such clichés as “the boiling cauldron of the Middle East” be regarded as a nonfiction
writer? The novelist has no political aim but is concerned with truth, not facts. As I say in
one of my essays, sometimes the worst enemy of truth is fact. I’m a writer of narrative
prose, siporet, but I’m not a prophet or a guide, nor am I an inventor of “fiction.”

INTERVIEWER

Yet your work is very much rooted in the realities of Israel today, and you do tell the
people and the government what is right and what is wrong . . .

OZ

Because our lives are soaked with history. History is not something on the TV screens, or
overseas, or in the Congress or the House of Commons, it is everywhere, and it penetrates
the most intimate tissues of life. To give an example: during the recent Gulf War, we were
issued gas masks against chemical bombs. My son who is asthmatic and can hardly breathe
had to wear one. We were sitting, shut tight in a sealed bedroom, wearing these ghastly
masks, looking like monsters, our most private intimacy invaded by a threat from two
thousand miles away. So you see, we can’t get away from the realities. People use moments
in the country’s history to measure time: I got married just before the Six Day War, they
say. Or, My daughter was born the day Sadat came to Israel.

INTERVIEWER

What language did you speak at home? Did your parents speak Russian or just Hebrew?

OZ

My father was from Odessa originally and had emigrated to Vilnius, Lithuania, which at
that time was part of Poland; my mother was from Ukraine. Their languages were Russian
or Polish. They met in Jerusalem, as students at the Hebrew University. My father knew
sixteen languages and spoke ten of them, and my mother knew seven or eight languages
too. They spoke Russian when they didn’t want me to understand, otherwise they insisted
on using only Hebrew. They feared that if I learned any European language I might be
tempted to go back to Europe, which they regarded as deadly for Jews. They themselves
had a love-hate relationship with it, as after an unrequited love: they loved Europe, but
Europe kicked them out. They left in the nick of time, otherwise I would not be sitting here
talking to you.

INTERVIEWER

Your parents came from that area that used to change hands between Poland and Russia,
and where anti-Semitism was more virulent than perhaps elsewhere in Europe. But isn’t
anti-Semitism part of the fabric of European civilization?

OZ

I have said that the image of the Jew is a segment of the European-Christian imagination, in
every sense. There is the wonderful, adorable Jew who is almost superhuman, who suffers
so much and excels. Then there is the terrible, diabolical Jew who destroys everything in
devious ways. The common denominator between these two types of Jew—the good and
the bad—is that neither is regarded as individual, both are forever representatives of their
race.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that the creation of Israel has got rid of that image? I notice here that people,
especially young Israelis, are not at all like European Jews, self-conscious about being
apart, but just people, like anyone else in the world.

OZ
I don’t know. It was certainly one of its purposes. It is time to dissociate the relationship
between the Jews and the Christian Europe and create a different, more balanced
relationship. A neighborly relationship, a come-and-have-a-cup-of-coffee relationship, not
an everlasting host-guest relationship, which is bad for both the guest and the host. Even
when the guest has become a prominent member of the family, marrying the son or the
daughter of the host. Even when the Jew has become more fluent in the language, traditions
and culture of the country than the “natives.”

INTERVIEWER

Your work is very much rooted in Israel, from the first stories and the novel Elsewhere,
Perhaps, which depicted the life of the kibbutz, to Fima, the latest to appear in English.
They arouse controversy for that reason. In a sense the chief protagonist in your books is
the land of Israel. Your position is that a homeland cannot be denied to the Palestinians any
more than it could be denied to Jews. So what is the solution?

OZ

The Arab world still spends twenty to twenty-five billion dollars on armaments per year.
Why? The point is that the Palestinians are here, and that they won’t go away. And the
Israelis are here, and they won’t go away either. So they are two peoples claiming the same
piece of land, the same house. They cannot share it, so they have to divide it. I think it is
urgent for the Palestinians in the occupied territories to conduct free, internationally
supervised elections, and whoever is elected should represent them and run their
government. It will be the first time they will have a legitimate representative government.

INTERVIEWER

What if the free elections bring in the extremists?

OZ

Even Hamas might become part of the democratic political machinery and behave
responsibly, or we might be back to square one, and have a clear knowledge that there is no
chance of conducting business with them. If that should happen, we will have to proceed
with a unilateral partition, saying, You don’t want to negotiate with us? Very well, we
divide: you take this bedroom, we take the other, you take this bathroom and we take the
other. It is like dividing a flat, turning it into a semidetached house.

INTERVIEWER

In the meantime, there is the question of human rights: the left accuses you of not taking a
strong stand on this and condemn the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli occupied
forces.

OZ
It is a question of diagnosis. The conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis is not a
civil rights issue, but an international dispute. We have not conquered the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip in order to deprive the Palestinians of their human rights (they never had
many of those), nor in order to give them their human rights. We conquered the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip because Israel was attacked in 1967, and threatened with extinction.
Once our security is safeguarded, we ought to go away from the Palestinian areas and let
them be. Palestinian human rights is a Palestinian problem.

INTERVIEWER

But the treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis during the intifada is what Israel’s human
rights people have in mind.

OZ

It is an illusion to think that there can be a rosy military occupation. It is like a friendly rape
—a contradiction in terms. I have invested every ounce of my energy in finding ways to
terminate the occupation, not to improve it, because I don’t think that if only the occupation
were nicer it would resolve anything. We don’t need to improve the way we rule over them;
we need to stop ruling over them. So in some ways my attitude has been more radical than
that of the human rights people. They have regarded the issue as a clash between two
communities, or two social classes, while I have always considered it an international
dispute between two different nations. Therefore I have not wasted any time trying to
introduce certain American left-wing concepts such as regarding the Palestinians as our
black Americans, or proposing that all we need is a system of yellow buses and integration.
I don’t waste time on these irrelevancies.

INTERVIEWER

You mean people like Chomsky and other left-wing campus intellectuals?

OZ

Chomsky has always been dogmatic on the Middle East conflict. A few years ago in
Germany I met some left-wing intellectuals who were enthusiastically pro-Saddam
Hussein. I wondered why? They said because he represented a poor third world nation
standing up to American domination. I explained to them that Saddam represented a
country far richer than Sweden. How come? they asked. I said that in terms of income-per-
capita, Iraq is richer than Sweden. They said, But we see Iraqis living in hovels, in abject
poverty. I said that if Sweden decided to have the third biggest army in the world, the
Swedes too would be living in hovels. I told them that in truth they loved Saddam because
he is a friend of Qaddafi, who is a friend of Fidel Castro, who was once married to Che
Guevara, and Che was Jesus Christ, and Jesus is love, therefore we have to love Saddam.

INTERVIEWER
Nevertheless, the idea is that if reasonable people of both sides sat together, they could find
a solution. Have you met Hanane Achraoui, for example? She seems a very intelligent and
reasonable person.

OZ

I have met hundreds of Palestinians, not necessarily in the happy sense of unison of hearts,
but on a pragmatic basis. It is another misconception of the West: they assume that the
Israelis and the Palestinians need to get to know each other better. I get invitations from
well-meaning institutions in America to go and spend a wonderful weekend with a number
of Palestinians in order that we may get to know and like each other, and whissht, the
conflict will go away! Like group therapy or marriage counseling. As if the Arab-Israeli
conflict were just a misunderstanding. I have news for them: there is no misunderstanding
between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We both want the same piece of land because we
both regard it as ours. This provides for a perfect understanding, and for a bitter conflict. As
I said, it is justice against justice—a perfect tragedy.

It must be resolved through a painful compromise, and not through having coffee together.
Rivers of coffee drunk together cannot extinguish the tragedy of two peoples regarding the
same little country as their own and only homeland. We need to divide it. We need to work
out a mutually acceptable compromise.

INTERVIEWER

What did you read as a child and as an adolescent?

OZ

Some of those Hebrew writers of a hundred years ago I mentioned earlier were also
compulsive translators, and had translated the great nineteenth-century Russians who were
a source of inspiration to many of them, and also German, French, English, and
Scandinavian authors. I read like a maniac all of them—there was nothing else to do.

INTERVIEWER

Who were the authors that left a lasting impression or triggered off your own vocation?

OZ

When I was nine or ten, I read Zionist books about the glories of the ancient kingdoms of
Israel. I decided to become a terrorist against the British Mandate; I built an
intercontinental rocket with the wreck of a refrigerator and the relic of a motorcycle. My
plan was to aim this rocket at Buckingham Palace, then send a letter to the King of England
saying, Either you get out of my country or off you go! I was an intifada child against the
British—I threw stones at British soldiers and shouted, Go home. So my early reading was
nationalistic, in the spirit of third world freedom-fighting: books about the Italian
Risorgimento, like De Amicis’s Heart, about little children who save their country by some
heroic deed or self-sacrifice. Later I discovered the Russians, in particular Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy, and above all, Chekhov. I felt Chekhov must have come from our neighborhood in
Jerusalem, no one had ever captured those little paralyzed work reformers who use big
words as he did.

INTERVIEWER

What about the American writers? Your work has often been likened to Faulkner’s, in that
he was rooted in the American South, in his own area, Yoknapatawpha County, yet has a
universal appeal.

OZ

There are three American writers who have become very important to me: Melville,
Sherwood Anderson, and Faulkner, in that order. I admire other American writers, but
those three are the ones I would single out in American literature.

INTERVIEWER

When did you decide to become a writer? After you had bombed Buckingham Palace?

OZ

There was no contradiction between the two activities: I could be a terrorist and write. My
father was writing fiery illicit pamphlets against the perfidious Albion, calling the British
every name in the book, quoting Shelley and Keats and Byron to prove how hypocritical
and unjust they were. At the same time he was a great Anglophile, as the following
anecdote illustrates. In 1947 there was a curfew and a house-to-house search. My father
was asked by the Jewish underground to hide a couple of Molotov cocktails in our home; it
was risky, as there was a death penalty for terrorist activities. Our apartment was tiny and
choking with thousands of books, and my father hid the explosives behind some books on a
shelf, and told us about it so that we didn’t set them off by mistake. The British arrived—I
still have a vivid memory of the incident—they wore khaki shorts down to their knees and
khaki socks up to their knees and in between their knees were exposed, white as snow on
the Alps. The officer was extremely polite and, apologizing profusely for the
inconvenience, began the search with a couple of soldiers. We were terrified. They
evidently thought my father was too bookish to be a terrorist and searched perfunctorily. As
they turned to go, the officer made some polite remark about the books and asked if there
were any interesting English ones. That set my father off: How do you mean, sir? Of course
we have English books! he said, and began to pull out one English classic after another. My
mother and I were petrified, lest having forgotten about the explosives, he might suddenly
expose them or cause an explosion, while he was showing off. The reason we survived was
that he had hidden the explosives behind Russian books—with the anarchists and terrorists
of nineteenth-century Russia—Bakunin, Nechaev, Kropotkin, Dostoyevsky.
INTERVIEWER

Your mother died when you were thirteen, and you left home for the kibbutz at fifteen.
Why?

OZ

I rebelled against my father and the bookish atmosphere of the house. I wanted a different
life. I thought I would carry out the revolution my father talked about but didn’t do
anything to create. I didn’t give a fig about school or university—I wanted to be a tractor
driver, like the ones in Soviet movies, working all day and drinking and making wild love
to kibbutz girls all night. It happened, to some extent, but what did not happen was getting
away from books.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing?

OZ

I had always written, ever since I had learned the alphabet at the age of five. I invented little
stories. I wrote at school, and when I was a tractor driver in the kibbutz and when I was in
the army. The turning point came when I became conscious that I was born to write, and
decided to be a writer. A couple of poems and short stories I had written while working in
cotton fields were published and well-received. So I applied for a one-day-per-week
dispensation from farmwork to write. Now everyone could have claimed he or she was an
artist and asked for release from manual work. A committee had to decide who was a
genuine artist and who was not. They said if we grant a day off to Oz, how can we refuse it
to the next applicant? There was an old man—the age I’m now—who said, Maybe this
young man has talent, maybe he is a future Tolstoy, but he is much too young. Let him
work in the fields until he is forty, then he’ll have something to write about. Luckily he was
overruled, and I was told that I could have one day a week, provided I worked doubly hard
on other days, which I did. But I was focused—I thought about what I was writing all the
while I was working in the fields. On writing days I wrote twelve, even fifteen hours a day.

INTERVIEWER

The result was your first collection of short stories, Where the Jackals Howl. Did you
decide to write short stories, before tackling a novel, as a kind of training, the way an
athlete does?

OZ

I needed quick satisfaction. I was very young and didn’t have the patience and wisdom to
play long games. I decided to write short stories, because it is a craft that gets you there in a
short time. I could work on a story in my head, then sit down and write it in one day.
Incidentally, I can no longer do this. I have a different pace.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think you will go back to the genre?

OZ

I might. I do from time to time even now, but not in the same way—under the rhythm of
teenage sexuality, with a tremendous drive and an unquenchable thirst for immediate
satisfaction. Now I write a first draft, rewrite it, come back to it and work on a particular
point, change this or that section and chisel away all the superfluous stuff.

INTERVIEWER

After that first book you went to university. Why? And why did you choose philosophy?

OZ

The kibbutz sent me to university because they needed teachers. My father said you never
see an advertisement in a newspaper saying, Wanted: a philosopher! So I thought I might as
well study something that nobody wanted. But I was lucky: I caught the tail end of the
generation of great philosophers teaching at Jerusalem University. The spirit of Martin
Buber was still there, as were Gershom Scholem and Bergman and others. Jerusalem was
then a bastion of central European thought, from Germany and Prague. But I was reading
philosophy while coping with generalizations, because I was a storyteller. When in a
discussion about ethics the professor said, by way of illustration, The first time Ruth met
David, my mind wandered off, and I began to imagine a story around their meeting. But I
managed to get fair grades and finish my degree.

INTERVIEWER

What was the curriculum? What did you read?

OZ

Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas . . . but I specialized in Spinoza.

INTERVIEWER

Spinoza is perhaps the greatest political thinker. Was it politics that attracted you to him?

OZ
Not especially. He created these ice palaces of pure logic, which were the crystallization of
emotions that at that time fascinated me. It was like music; he was closer to classical music
than any other philosopher. He turned me on, like Bach.

INTERVIEWER

In A Perfect Peace, you say that Spinoza is not against hope, that on the contrary he
“specifically stresses the idea of human freedom.” That we are free to accept the “laws
underlying the inevitable.” This is an interesting existential position, and you once had a
long conversation with Ben-Gurion, who also was inspired by Spinoza. Can you elaborate
on that?

OZ

What I meant was that there is a perfect balance in Spinoza between observation and action,
in that observation does not lead to passivity and fatalism—you don’t have to discard your
intellect in order to take action. Most philosophers believe that you have to give up
something for the sake of something else: either reason or emotion, either this or that . . .

I was a young soldier and read something Ben-Gurion had written about Spinoza, and I
wrote him a letter in which I strongly objected to his interpretation of the philosopher. To
my surprise his secretary rang and summoned me to his office the next day at dawn.
Imagine being summoned by the queen, or the president of the United States. Ben-Gurion
had tremendous prestige and charisma, though a tiny man with a huge head. He paced up
and down and tore my arguments to pieces, sharp as a razor.

INTERVIEWER

Spinoza acknowledged the divinity of Christ, and was excommunicated by the Jewish
religious establishment, the sin of apostasy being one of the most heinous in Judaism. I
don’t think that his conversion to Christianity was tactical—he really believed in it. What
do you think of that? Have you been tempted by Christianity?

OZ

Spinoza never converted to Christianity. He was excommunicated by the Jewish religious

leaders of Amsterdam, but never became a Christian. As for me, I am fascinated by Jesus,
one of the greatest Jews of all times, but I have never been tempted by Christianity. Jesus
himself, who had never crossed himself, never in his life seen nor could see the inside of a
church, might or might not, if he lived longer, have had a taste for this or that Christian
church. Or he might have kept his distance.

INTERVIEWER

Going back to your own writing. Often the most solidly rooted works of art are the most
universal. The great Russians are an example: Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, couldn’t be
anything but Russian, yet we all recognize ourselves in their characters and predicaments.
But in your novels, one gets the impression that the real protagonist is Israel—the land, the
people, the history. One favorite in the West is My Michael, which is the story of the
relationship between Hannah, an Israeli woman, and two Arab men in the aftermath of the
Suez crisis. It is read as an expression of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Do you consciously set
out to incarnate an idea?

OZ

You know, if you write in a troubled part of the world, everything is interpreted
allegorically. If I wrote a story about a mother, a father and their daughter, a critic would
say that the father represents the government, the mother, the old values, and the daughter
the shattered economy! If Moby-Dick was written in South America today under the name
of Vargas Llosa, people would say it is about dictatorship. If it were written in South Africa
by Nadine Gordimer, it would be interpreted as the conflict between the blacks and the
whites. In Russia the whale would be Stalin, in the Middle East the novel would be about
Israelis chasing Palestinians or vice versa. So that is the price you pay for writing in a
trouble spot. But I always start with a group of characters. Then they tell their story. I never
wrote a political allegory, or a novel of ideas.

INTERVIEWER

Nonetheless you have said that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a tragedy because both are right
in their claims to the land—“it is justice against justice.”

OZ

Oh, yes, in an essay. But my novels are not about justice. I’ll tell you a Hasidic story from
the Middle Ages, about a rabbi who in his capacity as a judge has to pass a verdict between
two claims for the same goat. He listens carefully to both claimants, then he decrees that
they are both right. His wife says, Dear Husband, it is impossible, you can’t divide a goat;
either it belongs to X or to Y, they can’t both be right. The rabbi scratches his head and
says, You know, dear Wife, you too are right!

I am that rabbi. If I had to tell you in one word what my work is about, I would say family. I
find the family the most mysterious institution, and the most unlikely, paradoxical,
contradictory. We have been hearing prophesies about the death of the family for centuries.
And look how it has survived religions and ideologies and regimes and historical changes.
Father, mother, brothers, and sisters, and what goes on among them. This idea makes me
realize that many conflicts in the world can be conceived in family terms: a perpetual
rotation of love and hatred, jealousy and solidarity, happiness and misery. This rotation is
in almost every one of my novels. It is a family in which everybody is in conflict with
everybody else and everybody is right, just as in the story of the rabbi and the goat. The son
is right because the father is tyrannical, the father is right because the son is lazy and
disrespectful, the mother is right because son and father are exactly alike and deserve each
other, and the daughter is right who can’t stand the atmosphere and has left the house. Yet
they all love each other. So I sometimes see the international conflicts through the
perspective of the family.

INTERVIEWER

Tolstoy says all happy families are alike, the unhappy ones are unhappy in different ways . .
.

OZ

With due respect to Tolstoy, I think it is the opposite. There are half a dozen clichés of
unhappy families, but each happy family—and these are really rare—is unique. I’m
fascinated by happy families.

INTERVIEWER

There is a noticeable change in your last few novels, both in form and content. For example
the penultimate one to appear in England, Black Box, is epistolary. Why did you suddenly
decide on this form?

OZ

By accident. I meant to begin the novel with a letter from a woman to her ex-husband,
whom she had divorced seven years previously. They have a son whom the husband has
renounced completely, and the ex-wife wants to arrange a meeting between them. So I
thought I would start with her letter. But then the husband answered back, a correspondence
started between them, and gradually other characters wrote letters, and it went on, beyond
my control, until the end. It is a mistake to think that the novelist is God Almighty and can
do anything he wants. At some point the characters take over. The novelist can put his foot
down and say, I refuse to take that direction, but he cannot tell his characters who to be and
how to unravel their stories. Black Box evolved into an epistolary novel because the
characters wanted it that way. I have to add that it is a dreadfully difficult form, especially
now that people just pick up the phone and never bother to write, so that the form has little
credibility. In this case as the characters didn’t talk to each other, writing letters was the
answer. I mean who writes letters now? A husband and wife who have had a row, and don’t
speak, they leave little notes on the refrigerator or the sideboard; children who have gone
away but write to their parents, whom they can’t stand, to ask for money. So letters become
a medium of intimacy and detachment at the same time. It is also a good way of putting
thoughts across without being interrupted in midsentence, which is what happens in family
arguments. As I said I always start with a bunch of characters.

INTERVIEWER

Another new aspect of your latest novels is the erotic element. Is it because you yourself
have reached the midlife point, when one begins to ask questions about basic aspects of
life?
OZ

The erotic has always been present in my work. There are not many explicitly sexual
scenes, but there is an erotic electricity. I don’t think it is something that suddenly surfaces
in my recent books.

INTERVIEWER

How long does it take for your novels to appear in the West after publication in Israel?

OZ

Usually it takes two years for a book to be translated, depending on how quickly Nicholas
de Lange, my translator, works, and on how long the production takes. The new one will be
called “Don’t Call it Night.” It is about middle-age love, and about childlessness. It takes
place in a small desert town not unlike Arad. Two middle-age people have been living
together for many years but have no children . . . But I’m not giving you the whole plot!

INTERVIEWER

What about the novel you are writing now?

OZ

I never talk about it—one mustn’t expose pregnancy to X rays, it can damage the baby.

INTERVIEWER

You are still young and have a substantial body of work behind you. Do you ever think
about death?

OZ

I’m fifty-seven, and in Israel that is no longer young. It means I’m older than my country.
Of course I think of death. I wouldn’t have an intoxicated enjoyment of life if I didn’t think
of death every day. I think of death, but even more I think of the dead. Thinking of the dead
is preparing for one’s own death. Because those dead people exist only in my memory, my
longing, my ability to reconstruct a bygone moment, almost a Proustian recapturing of
precise gestures, which might have occurred fifty years ago. One day I spent hours quietly
reconstructing a ten-minute episode of my childhood: a room with six people in it, and I am
the only one still alive. Who was sitting where? Who was saying what? Then I thought, I’m
keeping those people alive for as long as I can, in my heart, my head or my writing. If when
I die someone will keep me alive in the same way, it will be a fair deal.

INTERVIEWER
After fifty, death can come any time . . . Readiness is all, as Hamlet said.

OZ

I’d rather it came fifty years from now. I love life and enjoy it tremendously, but part of
that enjoyment is that my life is populated with the dead as well as the living. If death
arrived tonight, it would find me angry and unwilling, but not unprepared.