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Amos Oz

Israeli writer, journalist and intellectual (1939–2018)

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He was the author of 40 books, including novels, short story collections, children's books, and essays, and his work has been published in 45 languages, more than that of any other Israeli writer. He was the recipient of many honours and awards, among them the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Legion of Honour of France, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature, the Heinrich Heine Prize, and the Franz Kafka Prize.

In his obituary, The New York Times called Oz one of "Israel's most prolific writers and respected intellectuals".

Biography

Amos Klausner (later Oz) was born in 1939 in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, where he grew up at No. 18 Amos Street in the impoverished Kerem Avraham neighborhood. He was the only child of Fania (Mussman) and Yehuda Arieh Klausner, immigrants to Mandatory Palestine who had met while studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His father's family was from Lithuania, where they had been farmers, raising cattle and vegetables near Vilnius. His father studied history and literature in Vilnius (then part of Poland), and hoped to become a professor of comparative literature, but never gained headway in the academic world. He worked most of his life as a librarian at the Jewish National and University Library. Oz's mother grew up in Rivne (then part of Poland, now Ukraine). She was a highly sensitive and cultured daughter of a wealthy mill owner and his wife, and attended Charles University in Prague, where she studied history and philosophy. She had to abandon her studies when her father's business collapsed during the Great Depression.

Oz's parents were multilingual (his father claimed he could read in 16 or 17 languages, while his mother spoke four or five languages, but could read in seven or eight) but neither was comfortable speaking in Hebrew, which was adopted as the official language of Israel. They spoke with each other in Russian or Polish, but the only language they allowed Oz to learn was Hebrew.

Many of Oz's family members were right-wing Revisionist Zionists. His great-uncle Joseph Klausner was the Herut party candidate for the presidency against Chaim Weizmann and was chair of the Hebrew literature department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Klausner had a large personal library in his home and hosted salons for Israeli intellectuals; the lifestyle and scholarship of Klausner left an impression on Oz as a young boy.

Oz described himself as an "atheist of the book", stating from a secular perspective that his Jewish heritage "contains first and foremost books [and] texts". His parents were not religious growing up, though Oz attended the religious Tachkemoni school, since the only alternative was a socialist school affiliated with the Labor movement, to which his family was even more opposed. The noted poet Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky was one of his teachers. After Tachkemoni, he attended Gymnasia Rehavia.

During the Holocaust, some of his family members were killed in Lithuania. He has subsequently described the Holocaust as "the most significant event in my life."

His mother, who suffered from depression, committed suicide in January 1952, when he was 12. Oz would later explore the repercussions of this event in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness.

At the age of 14, Oz became a Labor Zionist, left home, and joined Kibbutz Hulda. There he was adopted by the Huldai family and changed his surname to "Oz" (Hebrew: "courage"). Later asked why he did not leave Jerusalem for Tel Aviv, he replied: "Tel Aviv was not radical enough – only the kibbutz was radical enough". By his own account, he was "a disaster as a laborer...the joke of the kibbutz". When Oz first began to write, the kibbutz allotted him one day per week for this work. When his novel My Michael became a best-seller, Oz quipped: "I became a branch of the farm, yet they still said I could have just three days a week to write. It was only in the eighties when I got four days for my writing, two days for teaching, and Saturday turns as a waiter in the dining hall."

Oz did his Israel Defense Forces service in the Nahal Brigade, participating in border skirmishes with Syria. After concluding his three years of mandatory regular army service, he was sent by his kibbutz to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he studied philosophy and Hebrew literature. He graduated in 1963 and began teaching in the kibbutz high school, while continuing to write. He served as an army reservist in a tank unit that fought in the Sinai Peninsula during the Six-Day War, and in the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War.

Oz married Nily Zuckerman in 1960, and they had three children. The family continued to live at Hulda until 1986, when they moved to Arad in the Negev to seek relief for their son Daniel's asthma. Oz was a full professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev from 1987 to 2014. He also served as a writer in residence and visiting scholar at universities abroad. In 2014, the family moved to Tel Aviv. His oldest daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, teaches history at the University of Haifa.

Oz died of cancer on 28 December 2018 in Rabin Medical Center, Petah Tikva, aged 79. He was buried at Kibbutz Hulda.

In February 2021, Oz's daughter Galia accused her late father of subjecting her to "sadistic abuse". In her autobiography, Galia alleged that Amos Oz beat, swore at, and humiliated her in a routine of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, writing that "The violence was creative: He dragged me from inside the house and threw me outside. He called me trash." Members of Galia's family have denied the allegations, claiming: "We have known all our lives a very different Amos, a warm and affectionate man who loved his family deeply and gently." In 2022, Oz's son Daniel published a memoir staunchly defending his father and criticizing his sister for supposedly distorting the truth.

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