A Tale of Love and Darkness

"Yes, they overlapped a lot. In my book I use them both and cross over from one to the other in the narrative. They were both there at same time and they were literally on opposite sides of the line sometimes. No one’s ever heard of Wasif, but Amoz Oz is celebrated as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, quite rightly. This book is just a joy. It’s beautifully written. It’s a memoir, not a diary. It’s written much later and he’s looking back over his life. He wrote a lot of novels, but this is, I think, his best book by far. His real name was Klausner and he was born in Jerusalem, but much later than Wasif, in 1939. He was a boy growing up in the 1940s, when Wasif was already a man way past his prime. But if one wants to understand what happened in Jerusalem in the first half of the 20th century from both sides, from two very artistic, unbigoted, open-minded, sensual men, these are the two best books to really follow the story. That’s what makes these two essential reading. Amos Oz came from what you might call the Ashkenazi bourgeoisie, not exactly the elite, but they were very well educated and very well connected to the Revisionist Zionist Herut party. They came from Lithuania originally and they were very cultivated. He described Jerusalem as a beautiful nymphomaniac, who crushes people between her thighs and swallows men. Wasif saw Jerusalem as a city that was a centre of life. Amos Oz saw it very differently. He saw Jerusalem as suffocating and narrow-minded, a sort of vampiric city. He saw the religion as destructive, the nationalism as a bloody curse and everything about Jerusalem—its holiness, its greatness, its historical reputation, the mythologies, everything about it—as a terrible curse on its people. So, you’re right. He just couldn’t wait to get out of Jerusalem. He went to a kibbutz and then to Tel Aviv. But in the 1940s, as a little boy, he was a witness to the war of 1948. “Oz… saw Jerusalem as suffocating and narrow-minded, a sort of vampiric city” When I was writing my book I saw him and talked to him a lot about Jerusalem. He was a totally charming and delightful person and very funny. He said the only way to make peace in Jerusalem would be to take the Western Wall and the two mosques on the Temple Mount and put them all in Sweden for 100 years until everyone in Jerusalem had made peace. Yes, it is possible, because if you like history or you’re fascinated by variety, hybridity and the merging and rivalries of cultures, and you like watching people; if you’re an observer of humankind, then Jerusalem will be one of your great joys. But it is a very suffocating city. It’s filled with hate and with religious people of different sorts. There used to be a saying in Ottoman times that ‘there’s no one so evil as the citizen of a holy city.’ They meant that the people who lived in Jerusalem were monsters of avarice, trying to screw money from every single visitor, especially pilgrims, who are, of course, particularly naive and easy to trick. And that’s still true today. You can see that everyone in Jerusalem is furious all the time. And there are a lot of mad people. Holy cities are very strange places. Yes, it really does. He understood it. He was not religious at all and his family weren’t religious. They were secular Jews, but on the right politically. They were a very distinguished family. But Oz foresaw a lot of what happened. He was a Zionist. He believed in Israel and he believed in Jewish independence and the Jewish right to a nation and a state. And he always hoped that it was possible to share the country and the city. And he was ready to do that. A couple of years ago. He read my book for me before it was published. He was very kind, warm and generous. His life was not without tragedy. His mother committed suicide. Then he went to live on a kibbutz and adopted the name Oz."

"I have to tell you this is a spectacularly good book. I could have chosen any number of Oz novels but preferred this recent memoir for its portrayal of the documentary reality of growing up in Israel in the earliest days of the Jewish state. It is set in Palestine just after the war before the Jewish state. His book makes the place seem real. Very little reality is absorbed from Israel and Palestine. It is always filtered through expectation and prejudice. And that includes the people who visit every day, the diasporas of both communities. It’s one of the reasons it is an unsolvable problem because the diaspora communities are incapable of seeing the situation through any kind of real or truthful perception. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, with this book, here is this world of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in the 40s and 50s. That same kind of knee-jerk reaction people had to Hess exists today, particularly with people in Europe. Everything Israel does is wrong and it would be useful for everyone to read this book and absorb the reality and see what Israel is like as a real place."