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A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange, Harcourt, 2004, $26.00 cloth, ISBN 0151008787.
This remarkable memoir, dense with history and fable, death and delight, noise and silence, is a masterful evocation of a lost childhood world and a kind of psycho-sensual profile of the evolution of a singular writer. Not incidentally, it is also a compelling account of the creation of Israel and a comment on its lost ideals. Ostensibly spanning the years of his boyhood and adolescence in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and as the Jewish state came into being, the book has an even greater span. Oz weaves generations of his own family's history, hundreds of years of Jewish history, and clear-eyed commentary on the present and future into supple, entrancing prose. His longtime translator, Nicholas de Lange, has rendered an English translation without a single false note.
The young Amos is a solitary boy who makes up whole worlds, rewrites history in his games, and hopes to "grow up to be a book." Oz brings vividly, sometimes oppressively to life the chronically cramped conditions he grew up in-both the two-room apartment he shared with his parents and the constraints and silence that governed their actions and relationships. Much of that had to do with the Holocaust, with the displacement of people who felt themselves entirely European into an alien desert world, and with the pressures and violence that were...