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The Wizardry Of Oz
Israeli author Amoz Oz reflects on his literary career.
ARTHUR SALM
Special to The Jewish News
I
sraeli novelist Amos Oz has
improved his English consider-
ably since he was a boy in the
streets of Jerusalem.
"The first English words I could
pronounce," he said, "were 'yes,' 'no'
and 'British soldiers go home!'"
Oz, one of the preeminent contem
porary Israeli novelists, was on the
phone from his office at Princeton
University, where he's teaching a
course in modern Israeli masterpieces.
Born in 1939, Oz spent his
earliest days in what was
British-occupied Palestine,
before the U.N. partition
that led to the creation of
the modern State of Israel
in 1948. The Jewish set-
tlers were as much at
unofficial war with the
Brits as they were soon to
be, officially, with their
Arab neighbors.
That rancorous, roiling
milieu is the setting of The
Panther in the Basement
(Harcourt Brace; $21), Oz's
latest novel. The young narra-
tor, nicknamed "Proffy" for
his professorial demeanor, lives a
wildly detailed fantasy life, as well
as an existence based in grim real-
ity: With two friends, he forms an
underground organization to spy on
and attack the
British.
It's make-
believe, in part,
but becomes very
real when Proffy,
skulking about
after curfew, is
nabbed by a
British sergeant.
When the two
agree to meet regu-
larly in a cafe to
learn each other's
language, Proffy's
comrades accuse
him of treason.
In her introduc-
tion to Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
1/9
998
BO
Joan Didion suggested that "writers
are always selling somebody out." And
betrayal, if not always in a political
setting, is a recurring theme in Oz's
fiction; Black Box, for example, deals
with it on a more personal basis.
Oz agrees with Didion — sort of.
"It depends on the definition of
treason and loyalty," he said. "As
Proffy concludes — and I think he
may have a point — anyone who
changes is a traitor in the eyes of those
Amoz Oz: "I dream in
Hebrew, and I laugh and cry
in Hebrew, so that's the natur-
al musical instrument for me.
English is a very forei language —
wonderful, but very oreign."
who do not change, and cannot
change, and do not even conceive of
change.
"A writer is often a witness for the
prosecution, but also a relative of the
accused, and sometimes a member of
the jury. He can be in some respects a
jailer, and he can be, and sometimes
should be, an advocate of all parties
involved."
The fictional Proffy is a few years
older than Oz was at the time of the
events in Panther in the Basement,
which is set in the summer of 1947.
Some of the scenes, however, were
taken directly from Oz's life.
There's a magical passage, for
example, in which Proffy
describes his father's book-
case as a map that seems
almost to cover, in both
a literary and geographi-
cal sense, the entire
world.
"It's my father's
bookcase," Oz admitted.
"In my recollection it's
huge, it's bigger than the
national library in
Washington. In reality,
my family lived in a sub-
marine of an apartment,
and there was a very
small room which was
lined with books. But
to little me, it
was a uni-
verse, not a
library."
Although
he now speaks
English fluently,
Oz writes exclusively
in Hebrew (his books are
available in translation), not
only because he can't spell properly
in English, but because "I dream in
Hebrew, and I laugh and cry in
Hebrew, so that's the natural musical
instrument for me. English is a very
foreign language — wonderful, but
very foreign."
But he also writes in Hebrew
because it was in that language that
his perception of the world was
formed. Hebrew has a very different
system of tenses, Oz pointed out, and
that entails a different concept of
time, and perhaps a different concept
of reality.
Cultural anthropologists call this
theory of deterministic language the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; Oz seems to
have come upon it naturally, and
taken it in with the desert air.
"The most significant characteristic
of Hebrew literature," he insisted, "is
that it's written in Hebrew — and that
makes a huge difference. Yiddish and
Hebrew, or English-Jewish and
Hebrew, are completely different
musical instruments. Even thematic
similarities are almost insignificant
compared to the different melodies
produced by those different instru-
ments."
Only when you familiarize your-
self with at least one foreign lan-
guage, he said, can you begin to
understand what your own language
is all about.
"It's very much like traveling: It's
only when you've escaped for some
time, when you've lived in a foreign
country, thaf you begin to under-
stand what your own country is all
about — perhaps as the second or
third love affair gives context and
meaning to the first."
❑
Arthur Salm writes for Copley News
Service.