Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reading for the Nation
- 2 Exile and Liberation: Edward Said's Out of Place
- 3 ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti's / Saw Ramallah
- 4 ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz's Living Utopias
- 5 Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh
- 6 ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz's Living Utopias
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Reading for the Nation
- 2 Exile and Liberation: Edward Said's Out of Place
- 3 ‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti's / Saw Ramallah
- 4 ‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz's Living Utopias
- 5 Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh
- 6 ‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’ Arabesques
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
My books are often seen as political statements, but they're not. If I want to state something very directly, for example that my government should go to the devil, then I'll write an article or go to a meeting or go on television and say, ‘Dear government, go to the devil’ […] If I want to make a political statement, then I'll write one. When the question is less simple - when within me I hear several points of view - then, perhaps, I write a novel.
– Amos Oz, Israel, Palestine, and Peace (1994)The Israeli writer must always position the present as a whole in the consuming context of a total history, and reconstitute the individuals of the present as agents but never as principals or sources of principle […] The Israeli Hebrew author resolves the putative historical order to a narrative order in which moral priorities are stated in reference to a cumulative series of oppressions and resistances superseded by the telos of the living utopia, the Zionist's Israel.
– Yerach Cover, Zionism (1994)In his epic memoir, Sipur ‘al ’ahavah ṿe-ḥoshekh (2002, Eng. A Tale of Love and Darkness, 2004), Amos Oz describes a post-World War II Jerusalem populated by anxious and impoverished European Jews, living under a British-imposed curfew and behind iron window grates, who spend their time ‘bent over a sheet of paper, correcting, erasing, writing, and polishing’ (2004b, 298). Observing the adults’ behaviour, the young Amos decides that when he grows up, he wants to ‘be a book’:
Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.
Because it was slowly dawning on those whose families had not arrived in Israel that the Germans had killed them all […] And who knew what the British might do to us before they left? And after they had left, hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs, millions of fanatical Muslims, would be bound to butcher the lot of us in a few days. They would not leave a single child alive […]
[I]f I grew up to be a book, there was a good chance that at least one copy might manage to survive, if not here then in some other country, in some city, in some remote library, in a corner of some godforsaken bookcase.
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- Information
- Rhetorics of BelongingNation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine, pp. 89 - 114Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013