A tale of love and darkness book summary

Some are lions of the Zionist movement—David Ben-Gurion before whom a young Oz made a terrifying command appearance , novelist S. Agnon, poet Saul Tchernikhovsky—others just neighbors and family friends, all painted lovingly and with humor. Though set mostly during the author's childhood in Jerusalem of the s and '50s, the tale is epic in scope, following his ancestors back to Odessa and to Rovno in 19th-century Ukraine, and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove them with their families to Palestine in the early s. In a rough, dusty, lower-middle-class suburb of Jerusalem, both of Oz's parents found mainly disappointment: his father, a scholar, failed to attain the academic distinction of his uncle, the noted historian Joseph Klausner. Oz's beautiful, tender mother, after a long depresson, committed suicide when Oz born in was

Some time in the night between Saturday and Sunday the fifth and sixth of January, , Amos Oz's mother ended her life in her sister's flat on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, overdosing on medication prescribed to treat her depression. In the newspapers, a debate was raging about whether Israel should demand and accept reparations from Germany. The pragmatic left thought that Germany should pay the cost that Israel would have to bear to absorb the survivors, while the right declared it was immoral to sell absolution in exchange for tainted lucre. A couple of years later, Oz, by then 15, broke with his right-wing father and went, by himself, to live on a kibbutz. Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, thought to be the biggest-selling literary work in Israeli history, is an exploration of why his mother killed herself, and the effect on him, a sensitive, intelligent boy growing up in Jerusalem during the last years of the British mandate and the war of independence. It is one of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read. I am a great admirer of Oz as a novelist, of his spare, quiet portraits of intimacy between couples, but here, in this long book, he reveals a huge talent for the big narrative picture, for Dickensian character portraits and an expert fusion of history and personal life.