Posted on 2007-05-05
The weekend before we set off for Israel. In Soho, New York. Nat Mun, Nat and me, Oh and charlie. The day we left for Israel. Nat could not see, she needed a lift.
Natalie Portman said that she loves Israel, despite her difficulties in being a Hollywood celebrity there. The Jerusalem-born film star said that she visits Israel from her home in the United States at least three or four times a year.
Portman may spend more time in Israel if she makes good on tentative plans to direct and act in a film adaptation of Amos Oz's memoir "A Tale of Love and Darkness."
"A Tale of Love and Darkness" if it is brought to the big screen, Jerusalem Capital Studios spokesman Danny Levy have met with Portman to discuss the possibility of her participating in and directing a film version of the book," he said. "A Tale of Love and Darkness" describes Oz's upbringing in Jerusalem amid the fighting during which the Jewish state was founded. Israeli media said Portman was interested in playing Oz's mother, who committed suicide when the author was a youth. Portman was born in Jerusalem and speaks Hebrew. In 2005 she appeared in "Free Zone," a road movie by Israeli director. The story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide, a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen and joins a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel.
It is not every day that one of the world's master storytellers turns the microscope on himself and unflinchingly examines the wellsprings of his personal and creative life. Amos Oz, Israel's best-known and possibly most accomplished novelist and political essayist, has done just that in this superbly crafted and profoundly moving memoir.
His mother's suicide, when he was just 12 years old, is the harrowing "tale of darkness" that lies at the core of Oz's story. It left him hurt, angry, betrayed and, above all, full of guilt and self-loathing: "All mothers love their children," he writes, "that's a law of nature. Even a cat or a goat. Even mothers of criminals and murderers. Even mothers of Nazis. . . . The fact that only I couldn't be loved, that my mother had run away from me, only proved that there was nothing in me to love, that I didn't deserve love."
Fortunately for Oz, he was not engulfed by that darkness, nor has he allowed it to cloud his work. Indeed, there is a great deal more love than darkness, both in his fiction and in this life-affirming memoir.
Oz recreates, with bitter-sweet nostalgia, the pre-1948 Jewish-Arab Jerusalem he grew up in as the only child of two deeply unhappy, misplaced immigrants, Aryeh and Fania Klausner. This was home until, about two years after his mother's suicide, he went to live on a kibbutz - the iconic creation of the self-assured, muscular new Jew, as far removed as is imaginable from the claustrophobic intellectual-immigrant world of his parents. He even rejected his Diaspora-Jewish name Klausner in favour of Oz, Hebrew for "strength, force, boldness".
Characteristically, he learned to recognise that this "old Jew/new Jew" dichotomy is a false one. Indeed, it is a leitmotif that runs through Oz's work that obsession with polarity of any kind - Israel/Diaspora, Jew/Arab, and even, perhaps especially, man/woman - is both reductive and destructive. His task as a writer is to explore the common ground, to seek the self in the other, the other in the self.
We meet dozens of marvellous characters, each drawn with the economy, insight and gentle irony that are hallmarks of Oz's storytelling.
His mother Fania, hardly surprisingly, occupies centre stage as, seeking the roots of his family tragedy, Oz traces the trajectory that took her from her idealistic girlhood in an increasingly hostile Poland to the dark basement flat in Jerusalem where she sunk deeper and deeper into her final, fatal depression.
She is portrayed as the tragic victim of a failed, perhaps impossible, Zionist dream: "My mother grew up surrounded by an angelic cultural vision of misty beauty whose wings were finally dashed on a hot dusty pavement of Jerusalem stone."
Poles apart from his tragic mother is his wife of 45 years, Nily - the vivacious, always-singing epicentre of light and joy in his life: "the clapper in the bell" - who he met on the kibbutz and who restored and has sustained his belief in the capacity to love, and be loved.
Then there is his Grandma Shlomit, who took one horrified look at the hot, dirty, smelly, raucous Palestine she arrived in as a reluctant refugee in 1933, and pronounced: "The Levant is full of germs."
For the rest of her life she doused everything with Lysol and took three hot baths a day to keep the germ-filled Levant at bay; she died some 25 years later - in her bath! As if there weren't any germs in the Europe she had escaped from, Oz comments wryly, "not to mention all sorts of other noxious things".
There are some moments of high farce, as when Oz recounts how Menachem Begin, former leader of the Irgun underground and hero of his staunchly right-wing family, complained at a public meeting in Jerusalem, shortly after Israel was born, that while the world was rushing to "arm" the new state's Arab enemies, no one was willing to "arm" Israel. "If only I were prime minister today," Begin declaimed, "everyone, everyone, would be arming us! Ev-ery-one!!!"
Unfortunately, Begin, who had learnt his somewhat bombastic Hebrew in his native Poland, used the archaic word "lezayen" for the verb "to arm". To young Amos's ears, attuned to the much less formal vernacular Hebrew of his native-born generation, the word lezayen had another meaning entirely: "to fuck".
To the horror of his family, as silence descended on the hall, he burst into uncontrollable laughter and his mortified grandfather had to drag him out by his ear. So ended any attachment Oz might have had to his family's right-wing political allegiances.
Much more sombre is his harrowing account of another epiphany: a childhood visit to the home of a prominent Arab family, the Silwanis, in east Jerusalem. The young Amos, then about eight, was sent out to play in the garden with the children.
Conscious of his role as representative of the Jewish People Come Home to Zion, he was determined to demonstrate to his Arab hosts - especially the comely 12-year-old Aisha and her little brother Awwad - what a fine fellow he was. He regaled them with his culture and erudition, reciting the poems of Zionism's leading poets (including one of his own) before going on to demonstrate that this New Jew could not only recite poetry, but could climb trees, too.
"Trembling with the thrill of national representativity," he scaled the large mulberry tree in the Silwani garden. At the top he found an old iron ball attached to a rusty chain. Grabbing hold of the chain, he whirled the ball in wild circles around his head, whooping loudly. "Now at last was muscular Judaism taking the stage, making resplendent new Hebrew youth at the height of his powers, making everyone who sees him tremble at his roar; like a lion among lions."
Then disaster struck. The rusty chain snapped and the heavy iron ball hurtled earthward. It just missed smashing the skull of three-year-old Awwad, but slammed into his foot, crushing it.
Oz remembers little of the mayhem that followed, but indelibly etched in his consciousness was the look of "loathing, despair, horror and flashing hatred" that the little boy's sister, Aisha, gave him. The seed was sown of his deep and abiding revulsion for chauvinism of any sort - that mindless, corrosive national self-assertiveness that denies the other and crushes not only the body but the soul of victim and perpetrator alike.
Ultimately, Oz is, above all else, a wonderfully perceptive and sensitive chronicler of human emotion - something he can capture and convey in a few simple words. Thus his touching description of how he reacts when his wife Nily responds favourably to his work: "When she likes something, she looks up from the page and gives me a certain look, and the room gets bigger." So too, when one reads a book like this, does the reader's.
