I have two confessions to make.
The first is that I’ve never read Amos Oz before. For an Israeli, this is quite shameful. I’m not sure why or how it happened, but somehow, even though everyone I know has read at least some of his work, I’ve managed to miss out on his books. I’ve never had anything against him or any reason to avoid him. I’ve only ever heard brilliant things about him. So how did this happen? Maybe because there was always some other required reading for most of my high school and college years. Maybe because at some point I’d accumulated more books than I could keep up with and had no room for a new author in my life. After a while, I just accepted this shortcoming.
The second confession is that the idea of life on a kibbutz never appealed to me. Though I’ve always considered myself a socialist, or at least prone to socialism, I seemed to have skipped the naïve fascination kibbutz life holds for young Israelis, and headed straight towards cynicism and cringing. I’ve been exposed mostly to art that portrays kibbutz childhoods as traumatic—having to sleep separately from your parents, everyone knowing the details of your life, having not one thing which is entirely your own. Things didn’t look too good for adults, either: conformity was valued and independent thought discouraged. The good of the place, of the community as a concept, was held in higher regard than the well-being of the individuals that made up that community. All of these were elements I felt lucky to have avoided. I’m writing in past tense because this classic idea of a kibbutz is a fading one.
But then I read my first ever Amos Oz book, and my feelings began to shift. Oz’s latest, Between Friends, is a book of interconnected short stories, all set in the fictional Kibbutz Yekhat in the late 1950s. In one way or another, all of his characters are torn between their faith in the communal cause and their own personal dreams. A young father tries to negotiate his wish to protect his son from bullying with his wife’s strong belief in children’s communal sleeping arrangements. An older father attempts to assess the moral validity of his teenaged daughter’s relationship with his friend, a middle-aged teacher. A high school student has to choose between his identity as a Sephardic immigrant and his loyalty to his sick father, and his attempted recognition as a kibbutznik. Throughout the stories, these characters, and others, recur, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to touch each other’s lives. Failing, they come to the inevitable conclusion that in a life built around togetherness, there is more loneliness and less affection than any one person can handle.
Amazingly, while this conclusion should feed my aversion to the idea of kibbutz life, Oz portrays this tension as a tender melancholy, an idyllic bitter-sweetness that made me feel nostalgic for something I’ve never experienced. A right of passage has been achieved.
I believe the secret to this pull is in Oz’s simple, poetic style; a style so quintessentially of early Israel that one cannot help but become swept up in the dream that it represents. He evokes the language of the time in which the stories are set: a Hebrew literary tradition laden with historical significance and romantic ideology.
And he thought about his classmates lying on one of the lawns now, the boys’ heads resting on the girls’ laps as they sang nostalgic songs…Moshe would give everything he had to be there now. Once and for all to be one of them. And yet he knew very well that it would never happen…He waited for a long time. He thought he could hear sounds of jagged weeping coming from the hospital, but he wasn’t sure. He sat there motionless, and listened.
In his delicate, economical writing, Oz evokes both the temptation and the forlornness of the simple homes, the manual labor, the shared lives.
…the rain started again, not in sheets but in a thin, stubborn drizzle. It wet his cheeks and fogged his glasses, and he thrust the plastic-wrapped book under his worn coat to hold it close to his chest. He seemed to be pressing on his heart as if he didn’t feel well. No one passed him on the path, so no one saw his hand pressed against his coat.”
He makes something as mundane as a sliced, peeled fruit sound gorgeous.
What Oz does to his readers is what the kibbutz does to his characters: it pulls them in and keeps them close, in spite of themselves, mesmerized by the beauty of a thing that is wrong for them. They exist in a quiet simplicity, plagued with a gnawing longing for the unknown.
Sondra Silverston has created a translation that uses the same kind of poetic imagery and idyllic settings to build a world of small, searching characters. She gets as close as one can to mimicking the original style, while using her own visuals and voice to evoke much more than is on the page. The only issue I took with her extremely accomplished translation is that some phrases have been altered slightly, in a way that doesn’t exactly change their meaning, but takes away some of the ambience and the nuance. I’m certain Silverston knew what she was doing, and there must have been reasons of rhythm for the cuts, but I kept wondering if those small details couldn’t be preserved. Still, there’s no denying that Silverston’s work flows off the page just as well as the Hebrew.
Oz’s stories are, quite simply, irresistible. Their beauty is transcendent. They made me want to stay forever in those quiet rooms, the silence interrupted by nothing more than the news titles on the radio and the cows mooing outside. The writing is rich with the smells and visions of the kibbutz, connected so closely in its residents’ minds with their life’s work, their mission and purpose. Every small event, every piece of clothing or play on words speaks volumes of these characters and the way they live. These short stories are the kind that so many writers try achingly hard to create, and they read so effortlessly. I was lucky to have discovered this treasure. I can only imagine what’s in store for me now, as I move back through Oz’s impressive body of work.
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Yardenne Greenspan, Asymptote editor-at-large for Israel, has an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators’ Association Fellowship. Her translation of Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin, was chosen for World Literature Today’s 2013 list of notable translations. Yardenne’s translations include work by Rana Werbin, Gon Ben Ari, Nahum Werbin, Vered Schnabel, Kobi Ovadia, Yirmi Pinkus, Ron Dahan, Alex Epstein and Yaakov Shabtai. Her fiction, essays and translations have been published in Hot Metal Bridge, Two Lines, Words Without Borders, Necessary Fiction, Agave, World Literature Today, Shelf Unbound and Asymptote, among other publications. She is currently working on her first novel.
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