Oz, Amos (1939-2018), was an Israeli novelist, short-story writer, and essayist known for his challenging and sometimes controversial writings about Israel’s society and history. Oz, who wrote in Hebrew, took an unsentimental approach to the development of his country’s culture. He dealt with such themes as conflict between rural Israel and the desire of a Western European urban lifestyle, and the division between the values of the first Israeli settlers and the more skeptical generation that followed.
Oz was born Amos Klausner on May 9, 1939, in Jerusalem, Israel, into an immigrant Polish family. He left home at the age of about 14 to become a soldier on a kibbutz (collective community). At this time, he changed his last name to Oz, the Hebrew word for strength. He graduated from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University in 1963 and received an M.A. degree from Oxford University in England in 1970.
Oz became a full-time writer in 1962 and completed his first book, a collection of short stories called Where the Jackals Howl, in 1965. He also wrote three stories published as The Hill of Evil Counsel (1976). His first novel, Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966), is an acclaimed portrait of life on a kibbutz. One of his best-known novels is My Michael (1968), a portrait of a struggling marriage that symbolically mirrors the divisions within the Israeli capital of Jerusalem. Scenes from Village Life (2011) consists of eight related stories about changes in an Israeli village over several generations. Oz’s other novels include Touch the Water, Touch the Wind (1973), A Perfect Peace (1985), To Know a Woman (1989), Black Box (1993), Fima (1993), Panther in the Basement (1997), The Same Sea (2001), and Judas (2014). In addition, he wrote A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), a memoir of his life in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
Oz gained an international reputation for his essays about politics in Israel and the country’s relations with the Palestinians and neighboring countries. The essays have been published in Israel, Palestine, and Peace (1995) and other collections. His essays on literature were collected in The Story Begins (1999). Oz died on Dec. 28, 2018.
