The obverse side to this exposure to language and books is the weight of expectation that rested on Oz’s young shoulders, the suffocating feelings of an only child who his parents hoped would take on the burden of their failures and disappointments and turn them into victories. Oz meanwhile dreamt of ‘escaping from these warrens of books and becoming a fireman’. Escaping, too, from the painful marriage between his father, ‘a pedant ...a rather scholastic, totally uncreative person’ and his dreamy, storytelling mother. ‘The mysterious question which I could not resolve,’ Oz told his audience in Edinburgh, ‘was how could two very well-meaning, very generous people generate such a tragedy?’
His reaction to his mother’s death, his father’s silence and expectations was hate and anger. At the age of 14, he left home to live on a kibbutz. ‘I killed my father,’ he writes, ‘I killed him particularly by changing my name.’ (From Klausner to Oz, meaning ‘strength’ in Hebrew.)
Towards the end of A Tale Oz says, ‘I have hardly ever spoken about my mother till now ...not with my father, or my wife, or my children....’ Yet his novels — from My Michael to The Same Sea — are haunted by versions of her. In this novel in which, with retrospect, one can almost see the birth of A Tale, Oz writes a letter to his parents that ends with, ‘If I am to forgive, then this is the moment.’ Another character chides the author with, ‘The way I see it, being in mourning for your mother for 45 years is pretty ridiculous ...you’ll soon be 60, a middle-aged orphan....’
The personal element of Oz’s tale, the time it has taken, the struggle it has been to forgive and to find peace with himself, can only make us think — as he surely intends us to do — about the time it might take the two peoples of Israel and Palestine also to find peace.
Perhaps with A Tale of Love and Darkness Oz has become a metaphorical fireman, rescuing both his parents if not from fire, then from the darkness of oblivion. Without a doubt, Oz ‘calls up the dead and shakes up the living’. Read him.
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