A Tale of Love and Darkness - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701174218 ISBN 13: 9780701174217

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1651

Synopsis

Love and darkness are just two of the powerful forces that run through Amos Oz's extraordinary, moving story. He takes us on a bold, seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, a quixotic child's eye view along Jerusalem's wartorn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. And at the tragic heart of the tale is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half years old. Soon after, still a gawky adolescent, he left home, changed his name and became a tractor driver on a kibbutz. 'Jews go back to Palestine' urged the graffiti in 1930s Lithuania, so they went; then later the walls of Europe shouted 'Jews get out of Palestine'. Oz's story dives into 120 years of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Those who stayed in Europe were murdered; those who escaped took the past with them. In search of the roots of his family tragedy, he uncovers the secrets and skel

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Touching, haunting, wrenching, amusing, and sometimes downright hilarious . . . This book is both richly panoramic and intensely personal . . . one of the most enchanting and deeply satisfying books that I have read in many years."--Robert Alter, The New Republic
Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, A Tale of Love and Darkness is at once a family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide when he was twelve years old. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and its community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation.
"It is impossible to give a full account of this book's riches."--The Washington Post Book World
"A[n] . . . ingenious work that circles around the rise of a state, the tragic destiny of a mother, a boy's creation of a new self."--The New Yorker
"Detailed and beautiful . . . As he writes about himself and his family, Oz is also writing part of the history of the Jews."--Los Angeles Times
Amos Oz is the author of numerous works of fiction and essay collections. He has received the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, and the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Amos Oz lives in Israel.
Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange

About the Author

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into 30 languages. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize and the Frankfurt Peace Prize. He lives in Arad, Israel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1651
• ISBN 10: 0701174218
• ISBN 13: 9780701174217
• Binding: Hardcover