Obituary on Amos Oz: Always fantastic, never fanatical

Politics and poetry were closely interlinked in this life, literature and life sometimes indistinguishable. Even as a child, he hung a sign on his door: "Amos Klausner, writer". And even as a teenager in the kibbutz, he took off the name of his Russian-descended parents and henceforth called himself Oz - the Hebrew word for "strength".

By this time, his mother had already taken his own life. The boy born in Jerusalem in 1939 dedicated his own life to building up the state of Israel. His own adolescence and that of his homeland ran parallel. Oz experienced in the Zionist home the reminder of the Holocaust, on the streets the fight against the British during the mandate, in the kibbutz the fear of the war over a multi-faceted land - and then the wars itself, in which he among other things served in a tank unit and was wounded.

photo gallery

9 pictures

Between the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War appeared his "Conversations with Israeli Soldiers," whose tone and deeper content in the title of a reissue hit very well: "You shoot and cry." The Israeli garrison, then acclaimed nationwide, he dared to criticize early on: "Even inevitable occupation is a corrupting occupation," he wrote in a newspaper.

Freedom for his own writing, he fought his way, if necessary locked in the toilet. "Another Place," his first novel, played against the background of real kibbutz experiences. His income was flowing to the kibbutz, the kibbutz socialized him socialistically.

We mourn for Amos Oz, who died today at the age of 79. He was one of the greatest writers of Israel and most famous voices of the country. May his memory be a blessing. pic.twitter.com/bgdJtDW03s

In many other works - no matter which genre he was using again by pushing its boundaries - the complex reality of modern Israel, namely the fear of the next assassination, the fear of war or the confrontation with one's own guilt , Even if his works were "just" everyday. He was interested, he once said, not for the tragedy, but for "the comedy of the unhappy family."

Proponents of the two-state solution

His fictitious writing aroused the displeasure of right-wing conservative and orthodox circles at an early age. Even more so when his balancing point of view resulted from his own life story. The talk of the "language as a homeland", at Oz once met them for once. He loved Hebrew more than his country, for whose future he fought journalistically.

An early proponent of the two-state solution, he was one of the founders of Peace Now, a pillar of the Israeli peace movement. As a renowned author, he was also heard outside Israel, a moderation voice in times of the intifada or the Lebanon war. He was not a romantic. So he advocated the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as the fight against Hamas in Gaza. Not from hate. Out of necessity - and soon revised his opinion of how everything Fanatic should always be a stranger to him.

He never wanted to visit Germany and did so at the invitation of Siegfried Lenz in 1983. In Lenz, Böll and Grass he wanted to recognize mentally literate writers, but insisted: "Normal relations between Israel and Germany are not possible and not appropriate".

Peace in the Middle East, in his opinion, could not be achieved by "drinking together and getting to know each other better" among "Jews and Arabs". In 1996, he said in an interview, "Whole streams of shared coffee can not eradicate the tragedy of two peoples who consider the same small country as their only home, we need to share it, we need to find a compromise that both sides can accept" , Just as Czechs and Slovaks parted ways, "without bloodshed.

Stockholm never called

His subtle literary promotion of such a solution, for instance in his autobiographical "History of Love and Darkness", made him a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature year after year. His great breakthrough came with "A Story of Love and Darkness", which appeared in 2002 in Hebrew and 2004 as a German edition. In 2015, the film of the same name was directed by Natalie Portman and released in theaters. His other works include the epistolary novel "Black Box," "Another Place," "Among Friends," and most recently "Judas," in which he describes the alleged traitor of Christ as his most loyal disciple, another change of perspective, another realization.

But Stockholm never called, for which he got as much as any other honor. A small masterpiece is the speech that Oz held in 2007 on the occasion of the awarding of the Prince of Asturias Prize. Here is all his poetry. The tragedy is that "so many of us, Jews and Arabs, can not imagine each other, can not empathize with others: the loved ones, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion, there is too much enmity between us, too little curiosity ".

Here, the fictive, the imaginary, the subjective, and indeed the free in narrative can be a bridge: "Read stories, dear friends, they will tell you much".

Amos Oz died in Jerusalem on Friday. He was 79 years old. Fania Oz-Salzberger, the writer's daughter, announced her father's death on Twitter: "My beloved father died of cancer today, he died quietly and in his sleep, surrounded by his loved ones. Please note our privacy Answer phone calls, thank you to everyone who loved him. "

אבא שלי האהוב הלך לעולמו ממחלת הסרטן, זה עתה, לאחר הידרדרות מהירה, בשנתו ובשלווה, מוקף אוהביו.
אנא כבדו את טרטיותנו. לא אוכל להגיב לפניות. תודה למי שאהב אותו.