A novelist is not God Almighty - Israeli novelist Amos Oz | Sunday Observer

A novelist is not God Almighty - Israeli novelist Amos Oz

6 February, 2022

Amos Oz is an Israel’s foremost writer who died on December 28, 2018. The novelist, journalist and intellectual was born Amos Klausner on May 4, 1939, to a family of scholars who had emigrated from Russia in the early 1920s and later settled in Jerusalem.

At the age of 13, his mother died, and at 15, rebelling against his father, he left Jerusalem to live and work in Kibbutz Hulda, where he also completed his secondary education. After completing his Army service in 1961, he returned to the Kibbutz to work in the cotton fields. Yet, the Kibbutz assembly sent him back to Jerusalem to study philosophy and literature at the Hebrew University. With his BA degree, he returned to Kibbutz Hulda and lived there for twenty five years.

Oz married Nily Zuckerman, an artist herself, in 1960. They had three children – one son and two daughters. In 1986, the family moved to Arad leaving Hulda, to seek relief for their son Daniel’s asthma — the clean desert air in the Arad alleviated his condition.

It was in his early twenties that his first short stories were published in the leading literary quarterly Keshet. His first book is ‘Where the Jackals Howl’, a collection of short stories, published in 1965. The first novel is ‘Another Place’ (published in the US as ‘Elsewhere’) appeared in 1966. They were published with an adopted surname Oz - meaning strength – discarding his original surname Klausner. Subsequently, Oz averaged a book per year with the Histadrut press Am Oved.

In 1967, he fought as a reserve soldier in the Six-Day War in Sinai and on the Golan Heights in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. However, he was 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.

Apart from more than three dozen novels and some collections of short stories, he has published many books of essays, mostly concerned with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Oz was a full professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev from 1987 to 2014. He also served as a writer in residence and visiting scholar at universities abroad. The following are excerpted from her Paris Review interview where he describes his art of fiction. The interview was done by Shusha Guppy in December 1994.

Don’t travel when writing

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.

….. 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—on 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.

Word processor

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.

A writer of narrative prose

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.”

Starting with characters

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.

Beyond my control

(There is a noticeable change in your last few novels, both in form and content?) 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, 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 mid sentence, which is what happens in family arguments. As I said I always start with a bunch of characters.

Don’t talk until finishing

(What about the novel you are writing now?) I never talk about it—one mustn’t expose pregnancy to X rays, it can damage the baby.

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