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Israeli writer Amos Oz' A Tale of Love and Darkness is a family saga as well as the document of a shattering tragedy. The legacy of the Holocaust reaches down the generations, with its sadness and fragmentation.
His mother lost everyone in her village, all of them rounded up and shot at the edge of the ditch which became their grave. His father lost his brother and his young family: father, wife and toddler shot together by the Germans.
Oz documents the birth of Israel as a modern nation. He works in the peace movement seeking some means of coexistence which recognizes both the demands of survival for the Jewish people and justice for those who lived on the land.
Oz wrote that as a child,
I hoped I would grow up to be a book....
Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.
Because it was slowly dawning on those whose families had not arrived in Israel that the Germans had killed them all....
The air was heavy with dread. And I may have already gathered how easy it is to kill people.
Books are not difficult to burn either, it's true, but if I grew up to be a book, there was a good chance that at least one copy might manage to survive, if not here then in some other country, in some city, in some remote library, in a corner of some godforsaken bookcase.
I am always fascinated by the dedication to learning in so many Jewish families. Whether by reading Isaac Bashevis Singer or Chaim Potok, one sees what a heritage of study marked the tradition of the Jewish people. Sometimes the wives of rabbis would support the family, to allow the scholar to dedicate himself to his work. Oz wonders if the familiarity with finer thought outpaced the possibilities for his parents, and especially for his mother in her traditional role. A delicate soul, she was haunted by ghosts, an unhappy marriage and the pettiness she saw around her. She loved and forgave up to the point of her own great generosity, until illness and despair overtook her.
The story of the war of 1948 is a sober memory. People spent months in their cellars, holed up tightly with other families. For those who had just survived war, they had to endure a siege. A teenage boy, the only child of neighbors, was killed in front of his house. Another man was shot and they found him in the morgue, identified only by the socks which Oz' father had lent to him.
The author shows this difficult relationship with the other, the Arabs, in his memoir. As a young child, a kind Arab man came to his aid when he became separated from his babysitter. In a childhood accident initiated by Oz, an Arab child was injured, fainted and then was whisked away by his family. Inquiries on the part of his father about the child were rebuffed. Like a parable for the larger political situation, the impact made by one people on another can be largely hidden behind the curtain on the life of the other.
After his mother's death, Oz moved to a kibbutz. He spent thirty years there, finding that as much as he tried to leave the intense and insular life of learning behind in favor of the rugged simplicity of the farmer-settler, he found himself to be at heart a writer. At the point where he finds his own life is the subject of his art, he leaves off his personal history.
Oz shows a sympathy gathered up from the years to look back on a shadowed childhood and the struggles of a people driven back to the corner of the earth where they came from. The sufferings of the Jewish people are apocalyptic, and yet the need for justice among the clashing peoples is acute, as Oz acknowledges.

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