Amos Oz, Great Writer and Advocate for Peace Between Jews and Palestinians, Buried

TEL AVIV, (Patria) - Great Israeli novelist Amos Oz was buried on the last day of 2018 in Kibbutz Hulda, where he spent significant years of his life. Before the funeral, his coffin was displayed at the Tzavta Theater in Tel Aviv, so that numerous admirers could pay their last respects.

He died on December 28th at the age of 79. Oz was a great artist, but he also played a more important role. He was one of the greatest advocates for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Amos Oz was extremely stubborn in the Middle East, and precisely because of that, a greatly important voice of reason. Pacifist ideas and civic activism marked his work as much as his novels, the fiction he so skillfully created.

An intellectual and professor who knew the history of his people and their neighbors well, a writer who, by often writing about families, spoke about the Middle East, Jewish culture, and human nature in general, Oz was one of the loudest advocates for a peaceful solution to the Arab-Jewish conflict in his country and globally. He was among the founders of the Peace Now movement, advocating for decades for the idea of two states and the return of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians.

“Oz and David Grossman, colleagues by pen and friends by conviction, are among the writers who enrich the reader on multiple levels with their books, and every interview with them is, at some point, like a meditation on good and evil for the journalist,” wrote Karmela Devčić, a journalist for Jutarnji list who had the opportunity to interview this great writer and man.

And although neither of the two mentioned had the luck to often see good triumph in life, neither of them ever stopped believing that it was, in the end, achievable and possible. That in the end, good prevails.

In an interview that Amos Oz gave to Karmela Devčić two years ago, when asked if he had ever lost faith that Jews and Palestinians would one day live in peace, side by side, he answered without hesitation, in the same instant:

“Never. No. Never. I was fourteen or fifteen when I realized that the main choice a person has in life is the choice between compromise and stubborn fanaticism. This is true not only in politics but in life in general, in marriage, in raising children. I believe in compromise. Both in politics and in private life. When I say compromise, I don't mean capitulation. I don't mean 'turn the other cheek.' Compromise means meeting the other halfway.”

Commenting on the current revisionist calls in Croatia, the rise in popularity of right-wing parties across Europe, and the increase in antisemitism and xenophobia in general, Oz told Jutarnji list at the time:

"Hitler and Stalin gave us a gift, although they didn't intend to, but that's how it turned out. For sixty years, and in some places longer, many, many people in many countries felt ashamed at the mere thought of racist ideas. They were embarrassed to be anti-Semites, to be violent, they were considerate of human life. This was due to the shock that Stalin and Hitler gifted the Western world. I fear that this gift from Stalin and Hitler has worn off. The dark parts of human nature are once again stepping onto the front stage. There are more and more people who know less and less about what Stalin and Hitler left us.”

He often reminded that the conflict between Jews and Palestinians is a tragedy, that it is not a black-and-white story of good guys and bad guys. He explained to both sides, as well as to the rest of the world, that neither of them, neither Jews nor Palestinians, have anywhere else to go, that in a way they are all right there, that everyone has a right to that piece of land, and that therefore there is no other option but to operationalize the idea of two states. Sooner or later, Oz believed, it would happen.

Amos Oz helping Palestinian women pick olives

Amos Oz grew up as an only child with parents who were European Jews and intellectuals, in a small apartment, with shelves full of books. Both his father and mother were polyglots; his father was a master of literature who in vain wished for a teaching position at the Hebrew University.

Amos Oz's mother, Fania, left Charles University in Prague before the war in Europe and came to Jerusalem alone to study history and philosophy. Many years later, deeply depressed, unable to adjust to life in Jerusalem and accept that she had to give up her ambitions, she committed suicide when her son was twelve. This departure profoundly marked his life and influenced the relationship between father and son; this is a topic Oz writes about in "A Tale of Love and Darkness."

At fourteen, he moved to a kibbutz, although he did not have the support of his father and relatives for this. At that time, wanting to distance himself from his father, he changed his surname from Klausner to Oz, which means courage. Simplifying things, of course, he used to say that perhaps, in defiance of his right-wing father and that militantly oriented nationalist family, he became a leftist.

His paternal grandparents moved to Palestine in 1933 from Vilnius, where they had arrived in 1921 after the October Revolution, fleeing the communists. Grandmother Shlomit Klausner held a literary salon in their Odessa home in the years before their move. Hayim Nahman Bialik and Tchernichovsky would come and recite poems, and discussions were held about the revival of the Hebrew language and literature. His father's older brother, David, did not follow his parents and did not move to Palestine; he remained in Europe. The Nazis killed him, an associate professor at the University of Vilnius, and his entire family. Oz named his son David after him.

In "A Tale of Love and Darkness," while writing about his uncle David, he states, among other things, that Jews were the first Europeanophiles, the first "enlightened Europeans," and today Europe is full of Europeans, Europeanophiles...

“Everyone else were Pan-Slavists, Pan-Germanists, or ordinary Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in all of Europe in the twenties and thirties were Jews. My father always said that three peoples lived in Czechoslovakia - Czechs, Slovaks, and Czechoslovaks, who were actually Jews. In Yugoslavia, there were Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrins, and only a handful of Yugoslavs.”

Growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and early 1950s, Oz and his parents often visited the home of Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who, a little later, in 1966, shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with the German poet of Jewish origin Nelly Sachs. Lingering around his father, he would listen to Agnon discuss literature and politics with him. When Amos Oz's first stories were published in the newspaper "Davar," as a young man, he hid the newspaper under his sweater and, excited, went to ask Agnon for his opinion. In his autobiographical "A Tale of Love and Darkness," he says about this: "In the end, I didn't dare; I was afraid of bothering him, and I left his house with a big belly, as I had come. Or with a bulging sweater. Only many years later, when my stories 'Where the Jackals Howl' were published in hardcover in 1965, did I gather the courage and send them to him. dquo;

He began publishing in the 1960s. He is the author of, among others, the novels "My Michael," "The Hill of Evil Counsel," "Black Box," "Fima," "Panther in the Basement," "The Same Sea," "A Tale of Love and Darkness," "The Son of the King of the Jews," "Judas." He has numerous essay collections, including "In the Land of Israel," "Israel," "Palestine and Peace," "How to Heal a Fanatic." In one of his essays, Oz, who believed that literature was a kind of antidote to fanaticism, writes: "The essence of fanaticism lies in the desire to forcibly change other people. The well-known tendency to improve one's neighbor, to reform one's spouse, or to program one's child, or to show one's brother the right way, rather than to leave them as they are.

“Often, a fanatic is more interested in you than in himself. He wants to save your soul, he wants to deliver you, he wants to free you from sin, from error, from smoking, from your faith or disbelief, he wants to improve your eating habits, or cure you of addiction to drinking or voting. The fanatic cares a lot about you, he is always hanging around your neck because he truly loves you, or he is grabbing you by the throat in case you turn out to be an incurable case for salvation. And in any case, from a topographical point of view, hanging around the neck and grabbing by the throat are almost the same action.”

This is how Oz described fanaticism, observing it in everyday relationships and extrapolating it to the societal level.

At Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva, where he once taught Hebrew literature, the Amos Oz Archives have been operating for years. All editions of his books and all his written legacy, as well as scholarly works about him, are collected there.

In an interview with Jutarnji, he said that he taught his students, in addition to theoretical analysis, how to be good readers. Oz distinguished between a "scheming reader" who always looks for the author behind what is written, some detail about their thoughts and life, and a "good reader."

“A good reader brings their own life into the experience of reading, tries to put themselves in the situation of several characters in the story. A good reader asks themselves, what if I were him or her, what would I do, think, how would I feel. Reading a novel is not like reading a manifesto; one should not look for grand conclusions and moral lessons in it. Reading literature serves to bring you closer to yourself, to get to know yourself.”