‘Every true writer becomes a writer because of a profound trauma experienced in youth or childhood,’ wrote Amos Oz in The Silence of Heaven, his study of the work of the Israeli Nobel-prize winner Shmuel Yosef Agnon. With reservations, he added, ‘We might venture to say that the flight of the narrator’s imagination is as high as the depth of his wound….’
All this might apply to Oz himself, his own profound trauma being the suicide of his mother, Fania, when he was 12. Perhaps, too, it is possible to say that the depth of that wound has made Oz one of the greatest novelists of our times.
At last month’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, Oz told the audience that writing A Tale of Love and Darkness was ‘part of my peace process with myself’. He’d reached the age, he said (he’s now 65), ‘when I could look at my parents as if they were my children’.
The publishers have discreetly stamped ‘memoir’ on the back of the book, although Oz himself has come to dislike genre labels, including the distinction between prose and poetry.
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