The veteran contributors to this volume take as their central drama, and their essential task for analysis, the enduring literary and political legacy of Israel Prize laureate Amos Oz (1939–2019). Born a decade prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, in what was then Palestine under British rule, Oz’s life spanned the country’s entire history, and both his fiction and nonfiction restlessly probe and illuminate its fraught conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalences. Throughout his career, Oz grappled frankly with the often-painful realities of Israeli life while also celebrating the ebullience of the Israeli spirit, and his sophisticated understanding of the sociopolitical turmoil of his society was always accompanied by intensely lyrical language and deep penetrations into the vulnerabilities of the human psyche. The volume’s twenty contributors bring an exciting diversity of concerns and perspectives to Oz’s most celebrated novels (including his powerfully resonant final novel,
Judas) as well as to overlooked facets of his oeuvre, illuminating the breathtaking scope of his literary legacy. Together, they offer gripping analyses of his urgent and profoundly universal works about political and romantic dreamers whose heartfelt struggles with both their own human frailties and those of the state ultimately resonate far beyond Israel itself.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction: Amos Oz’s Arduous Truths and Ambivalences
Ranen Omer-Sherman
Part 1. IN A RETROSPECTIVE MODE
1. Reflections on
In the Land of Israel
David Grossman
2. Hannah Gonen . . . and Me: A Personal Essay
Sidra De Koven Ezrahi
3. The History of a Long Conversation
Nurith Gertz
4. Homeless between Two Homes
Avraham Balaban
5.
My Michael, May 1967
Nissim Calderon
Part 2. NOMADS, VIPERS, AND WOMEN
6. Maternal Illness and the Israeli Body Politic at War
Nitza Ben-Dov
7. The Little Plot and the Big Plot in Oz’s Early Fiction
Oded Nir
8. Oz’s Literary Genealogies: Salvage Poetics in
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Sheila E. Jelen
Part 3. COMING OF AGE: CONSTRUCTING THE HEBREW HOME(LAND)
9. Cat People: Coming of Age in
Mr. Levi and
Panther in the Basement
Adam Rovner
10. Tilling the Soil of National Ideology: Oz and the Hebrew Environmental Imagination
Eric Zakim
11. On Eternity: Homelessness and the Meaning of Homeland
Liam Hoare
12. The Dialogic Encounter between New and Old: The Biblical Intertext in Oz’s Fiction
Nehama Aschkenasy
Part 4. OZ AND THE OTHER: MIZRAHIS AND PALESTINIANS
13. Oz’s Contentious Journey:
In the Land of Israel
Adia Mendelson-Maoz
14. Oz against Himself: Between Political Romanticism and Social Realism in
Black Box
Joshua Leifer
15. “Like Belfast, Rhodesia, or South Africa”: Oz and the Ideologies of Oslo
Moriel Rothman-Zecher
16. And They Lived Separately Ever After: The Two-State Solution as Literary Ending
Vered Karti Shemtov
Part 5. DREAMERS, ICONOCLASTS, AND TRAITORS
17. Of Howling Jackals and Village Scenes: A Lament
Yaron Peleg
18. Exultation, Disillusionment, and Late Inspiration: Oz’s Once and Future Kibbutz
Ranen Omer-Sherman
19. From Tragedy to Betrayal:
Judas and the Subversive Politics of Oz’s Last Act
Sam Sussman
Afterword: About My Father
Fania Oz-Salzberger
Contributors
Further Reading: Critical Resources in English
Index
Über den Autor
Ranen Omer-Sherman is Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Louisville. His previous books include
Imagining Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film and
Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert.
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