The death of Amos Oz, love and darkness

With Amos Oz, has died, the respected Israeli writer, is also one of the best – he was constantly in the conversation for the Nobel prize in literature, and if this award would be for an Israeli from the cowardly political calculus so unlikely would have been able to argue for literary reasons, no one something about it. The pain in that Oz, like so many other important authors in Stockholm came up empty, but this is compensated by the fact that he has otherwise pretty much all the major awards, what it is: in 1992, the peace prize of the German book trade, and later the Israel prize, the Goethe prize, the Prince of Asturias award, the Heinrich Heine prize, the Siegfried Unseld prize, the Franz Kafka prize and, in 2014, as the first of the Siegfried-Lenz prize.

Andreas platthaus

editor responsible for the literature and literary life.

F. A. Z.

That so many of these honors were awarded in Germany, is a mirror image of the fascination of the audience for this on the one hand, eminent opinionated, on the other hand, uncompromising literature, a writer committed to. So much So, he volunteered in his home country, to local political issues to word – always moderate, always open also to the Palestinian concerns, but also reliable as an Israeli Patriot, he was committed to the Actual sway: his fictional work.

Starting in 1965 with the story collection “If the jackals howl”, the University of Minnesota recently, only a few months before his death, the German audience finally available, told in 1939 in Jerusalem, the son of a Russian-born family name Klausner, born in Oz (that’s the name he took on in the kibbutz) always car primed autobiographical: about his experiences as a child in the stage of the Israeli independence struggle, about his time as a Kibbuznik and then use the experience as a soldier in the six day and the Yom Kippur war. This pattern is valid Israeli CV let his critical voice-so-remarkable – and it made his nationalist opponents hard, this voice is easy to dismiss. Especially since, if their views were represented in fictional guise, therefore, such as 2002 in “A tale of love and darkness”, the novel about his own Childhood and at the same time, the Childhood of the state of Israel.

The hope

the first of a total of fourteen novels, appeared in 1966; ten years later, this was also the first publication of Oz’s fiction, to Create in English: first of all, when Claassen Verlag as “Nobody left alone”, 2001 by Suhrkamp in the Transfer of its long-standing congenial Translator Ruth Achlama under the original title “A different place”. But here they had met Oz even earlier, as a political author. In 1970, just shortly after the Hebrew Original, had appeared to be together with Avraham Schapira written conversation tape with Israeli soldiers that drew international attention, and in his Appendix to the narrative claim of already demonstrated, which should bring in his Russian colleague, Svetlana Alexievich very much later, the Nobel prize for literature: the Form of sophisticated a stylistically highly, subjective documentation.