Arts & tie

IN LOVE WITH LANGUAGE

from page 39

portraits. I was struck by how Oz's seeming-
ly meandering narrative mirrors that of
Garcia Marquez's luminescent Living to Tell

tomes in his briefcase),
and his uncle, Joseph
Klausner, a world-class
scholar and author of
Judaism and humanism,
figures prominently in
Oz's reminiscences.
Oz's parents were, like
many Jewish intellectuals,
people who defined high
culture in European terms
but who also knew full
well that that culture was
systematically eradicating
its Jews.
Born in 1939, Oz grew up in the war-torn
Jerusalem of the '40s and '50s, and has emerged as
both the imaginative historian and conscience of the
State of Israel.
Given the deadly Palestinian suicide bombings of
the last few years and the deep division in Israeli
society about how to forge a lasting peace with the
Arab population that surrounds it, Oz's leftist Peace
Now position earmarks him as either a prophet or a
fool.
Oz's mother died from an overdose of sleeping
pills. She was 39 at the time; her son was 12. A Tale
of Love and Darkness threads his mother's troubled
life through his memoir, only focusing on the suicide
itself in the last pages. Oz, in effect, circles around
defining moments, abandoning strict chronology for
the more powerful effects of accretion.
The same thing is also true of how he limns family

the Tale.
In less generous hands, Oz's memoir could
have been a tale of unmitigated "darkness,"
one focusing on family tensions, political
differences and the other constraining forces
that led him to abandon Jerusalem at 15 to
join a kibbutz, change his name and eventu-
ally become a writer.
Instead, Oz, rightly, gives "love" a chance
to flower and humor an opportunity to
breathe. Here, for example, is Oz remember-
ing how he was, at 9, an avid newspaper
reader and political debater:
"I conducted proud yet pragmatic talks at
that time with Downing Street, the White
House, the pope in Rome, Stalin and the
Arab rulers ... In those days I was not so
much a child as a bundle of self-righteous argu-
ments, a little chauvinist dressed up as a peace-lover,
a sanctimonious, honey-tongued nationalist, a 9-
year-old Zionist propagandist."
No doubt some of Oz's detractors would argue
that he is as self-righteous and sanctimonious as he
was when a boy in knickers. My own feeling, howev-
er, is that Oz is both clear-eyed and unflinchingly
honest. He knows the value of disarming his critics
by a few well-placed confessions.
The result is a book worth our attention if for no
other reason than the pleasure of reading Oz's lyrical
sentences. Here, for example, Oz explains that the
words "Tel Aviv" conjure up "the picture of a tough
guy in a dark blue singlet, bronze and broad-shoul-
dered, a poet-worker-revolutionary, a guy made
without fear, the type they called a `Flevreman,' with

a cap worn at a careless yet provocative angle on his
curly hair, smoking Matusians, someone who was at
home in the world ..."
Oz's sentence goes on for about 50 more words.
Later, he alternates his sentence rhythms, capturing
Tel Aviv in a single striking image: "The whole city
was one big grasshopper."
But important as style and language are in this
backward glance at what made Oz a man and a
writer, what we learn about in A Tale of Love and
Darkness is the conflicting currents of delight and
worry, memory and desire, that define Israeli society
— at least as Oz sees it.
In this sense, however much of Oz's book is a per-
sonal chronicle, it is also a testament that spans some
six decades and that records what it means to discov-
er a new language (his uncle Joseph Klauser added a
number of words to the modern Hebrew lexicon).
It is hardly a secret that we are currently awash in
memoirs and that adding one more life story to the
heap is bound to produce skeptical sighs. But A Tale
of Love and Darkness has a way of hooking readers
early and keeping them turning its pages.
Concrete images from his childhood — whether
they be words that he met in his early reading
("meadow," for example) or the excitement of a ring-
ing telephone when that "invention" was a new phe-
nomenon — lead, as they must, to rich mines of
memory.
To put Oz in very good company, classic books
such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and
Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past come to
mind whenever Oz works up a good head of imagi-
native steam. At its best, A Tale of Love and Darkness
is that good. ❑

—

Sanford Pinker, Jbooks.com

SPARE, HAUNTING PROSE from page 39

nothing is "more annoy-
ing" than the fact that
many critics think of him
as a "Holocaust writer."
The very term, which
has trailed him since the
publication of Smoke in
1962, implies that a
h he Story of aife
writer should be identi-
fied by his themes rather
than by his language. For
Appelfeld, a "writer, if he's
a writer, writes from with-
in himself and mainly
about himself, and if
there if any meaning to what he says, it's because
he's faithful to himself — to his voice and rhythm."
True, all true, although one might want to add
that memory (that which, in Appelfeld's view, is tan-
gible, solid, capable of pulling him toward the
known) and the imagination (which has wings and

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42

sails him toward the unknown) are com-
mingled in his best work, and moreover,
that the voice "speaking memory" — as
Vladimir Nabokov might have put it — is
about the 7-year-old child who was forced
to live through the anguishes of our last,
bloody century.
How could he not be a "Holocaust
writer," however much he might want to
separate himself from others who sentimen-
talize, falsify or, worst of all, trivialize the
Holocaust?
One could argue that Israel takes its litera-
ture more seriously than does America and
that as a consequence Israeli literary politics
is always on the scene. As Appelfeld discov-
ered early in his writing career, certain crit-
ics and advice-givers either believed that no
writing about the Holocaust was possible or
that his writing "shouldn't write about the weakness-
es of the victims but should emphasize the heroism,
the ghetto uprisings and the partisans."
There were, in truth, no end of reasons for editors
to reject his manuscripts, so it is hardly surprising
that, during the late 1950s, he gave up his "ambi-

tion to become an Israeli writer" and, instead,
"made every effort to become what I really was: an
emigre, a refugee, a man who carries within him the
child of war, who finds talking difficult and tries to
speak with a minimum amount of words."
The Story of a Life is told in the same sparse,
understated way that characterizes Appelfeld's best
work. It is as if he is afraid that adding too many
notes will invariably add some false ones or that the
road to sentimentality.is paved with excess.
Instead, Appelfeld constantly calls our attention to
what the sound of a word like erdberren ("strawber-
ries") can unpack or how "whenever it rains, it's cold
or a fierce wind is blowing," he is "taken back to the
ghetto, to the camp or to the forest where I spent
many days."
Memory has deep roots in Appelfeld's body, and
so, too, I would argue, does his imaginative capacity
to weave apparently disparate sensations into some-
thing very close to a coherent whole. All of which is
more evidence (as if more were needed) that Aharon
Appelfeld continues to be one of Israel's most
important writers.

❑

— Sanford Pinker, Jbooks.com