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ABSTRACT
The notion of space is central to Jewish civilization as it evolved over complex geography. Amos Oz, the prominent Israeli writer explores the continuity of cultural and spatial experiences of Jewish populace in the land of Israel. This paper focuses on interpreting Oz’s image of Israel and the psychological multiplicity of Jewish civilization in A Tale of Love and Darkness, his memoir of family saga and national history. Oz’s arguments regarding the collective Jewish consciousness in connection with the distributed geographical space is analysed as a chronotopic discourse. The memoir deconstructs Oz’s Sabra image attributed by the Zionist ideology and offers a post-modern dynamic narrative constructed well within the notions of time and space. A spatial reading of the memoir explores the existential ties between Jews and the land of Israel.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Eric Zakim, To Build and be Built Landscape, Literature and the Construction of Zionist Identity (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 1.
2 Yitzhak Gil-Har, ‘French Policy in Syria and Zionism: Proposal for a Zionist Settlement’, Middle Eastern Studies 30, no. 1 (1994): 155–65. Gilhar notes that Zionism seeks to establish a permanent home for Jews in Palestine under the protection of Britain rejecting any kind of help from France. Despite its political attributions, Zionist settlement action concentrated on preserving the singularity of Jewish culture by promoting Jewish farmers, artisans and manufacturers.
3 Adams, Hoelscher and, Till, Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2004), 5. The term topophilia is coined by Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan to describe the ‘affective bond between people and place’. He stated that the influence of topophilia tends to vary from person to person and from culture to culture as it is an effective response to place. It can also ‘actively produce places for people’ as the association between land and people is expected to alter the nature of that particular place or the people as a whole.
4 Zvi Bekerman, ‘Constructivist perspectives on language, identity, and culture: Implications
for Jewish identity and the education of Jews’, Religious Education (2001): 467–68.
5 Yael Zerubavel, ‘The “Wandering Israeli” in Contemporary Israeli Literature’, Contemporary Jewry 7 (1986): 127–28.
6 Moshe Pelli, The Age of Haskalah: Studies in Hebrew Literature of the Enlightenment in Germany (Lanham: University Press of America, 2006), 6–8.
7 Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, trans. Nicholas de Lange (London: Vintage Books, 2004), 491–93.
8 Amos Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4.
9 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 101.
10 Ibid., 4.
11 Baruch Kimmerling, Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 25–57. He argues that it is the clashes, tensions and complementarities that link these entities despite their differences. The phenomena of reciprocal relationship explores the association between Jewish and Arab communities in mandatory Palestine, state and society in Israel, patterns of militarism and the problems of jurisdiction in an immigrant-settler society in a larger sense. on
12 Land and Power: Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 by Anita Shapira, trans. William Templer (England: Oxford University Press, 1992). Though not a homogenous movement, Zionism advocated a permanent solution for the Jewish predicament in their ancestral homeland.
13 Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 78.
14 Uri Eisenzweig, ‘An Imaginary Territory: The Problematic of Space in Zionist Discourse’, Dialectical Anthropology 5(1981): 261–262.
15 Leon Pinsker, ‘Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew’, in Modern Jewish History: A Source Reader, eds. Robert Chazan and Marc Lee Raphael (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 173–4.
16 Uri Eisenzweig, ‘An Imaginary Territory: The Problematic of Space in Zionist Discourse’, Dialectical Anthropology 5(1981): 263–264. The decision on Palestine in 1905 was influenced by the majority of Eastern European Jewish delegates in the council. Herzl had considered Argentina, Sinai, Cyprus and Uganda for the settlement of Jewish refugees. Even his visions of the future Jewish state in the 1896 book do not resemble Palestinian geography.
17 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, An Attempt at a modern solution of the Jewish Question (New York: American
Zionist Emergency Council, 1946), 137.
18 Ibid., 82.
19 Doreen Massey, ‘Philosophy and politics of spatiality: some considerations. The Hettner-Lecture in Human Geography’, Geographische Zeitschrift 87 (1991): 2.
20 Ibid., 8.
21 Professor Avner Holtzman argues in his paper ‘The Founding of Israeli Literature: “1948 Generation” Revisited’ (given at University of California on 12 March 2007) that a unified image of the ideal Sabra is seldom observed in the writings of A. B. Yehoshua, Moshe Shamir, Yaakov Shabtai and other writers of the 1948 generation.
22 Avraham Balaban, Between God and Beast: An Examination of Amos Oz’s Prose (Pennsylvania: University Park, 1993), 179.
23 David Remnick, ‘The Spirit Level: Amos Oz Writes the Story of Israel’, The New Yorker, November 1, 2004, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/11/08/the-spirit-level. Remnick reflects on how Oz became a part of the mid-Century Zionist iconography and continues to be the quintessential prototype of that ideology.
24 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 1.
25 Ibid., 2.
26 Ibid.
27 Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God. A Study of Tragic vision in the Pensees of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (London: Routledge, 2016), 156.
28 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 11.
29 Ibid., 26.
30 Ibid., 276.
31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 173.
32 Ibid.
33 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 414.
34 Ibid., 414–5.
35 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982) 84. Bakhtin explains the time-space relation from its specifications in Mathematics. While transferring the concept into literary studies, he acknowledges Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the notion of time as the fourth dimension of space.
36 Ibid.
37 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 347.
38 Gershon Shaked, ‘Matsevah le-avot ve-siman le-vanim: Ha-otobio-grafyiah shel Oz al reka ha-otobiografyot shel Guri, Kaniuk ve-Applefeld’, Israel 7 (2005): 19. Quoted text is translated by Eran Kaplan. See Eran Kaplan, ‘Amos Oz and the Sabra Myth’, Jewish Social Studies 14, no.1 (2007): 121. Shaked argues that Oz’s memoir reaffirms Zionist credentials as he comprehends the Jewish-Arab conflict in a larger perspective. Oz recognizes that the origin of the conflict is not only the occupation but also the Jewish presence in the land itself. Hence the memoir is politically ensconced within the Zionist narrative.
39 Anita Shapira, ‘Ha-sipur ha-tsiyoni shel Amos Oz’, Israel 7 (2005): 1. English translation of the passage quoted in the text is taken from Eran Kaplan, ‘Amos Oz and the Sabra Myth’, 121.
40 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World A Bradford Book (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
41 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 287.
42 Amos Oz, Fima, trans. Nicholas de Lange (London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1993), 309.
43 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 373.
44 Amos Oz, My Michael, trans. Nicholas de Lange (London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1972), 224.
45 Oz, My Michael, 153.
46 Amos Oz, The Hill of Evil Counsel, trans. Nicholas de Lange (London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1976), 97.
47 Zerubavel, ‘The Mythological Sabra and Jewish Past: Trauma, Memory, and Contested Identity’, 118. He discusses the experience of uprooting as an inherent feature of immigration. The traumatic events of the diaspora and the pervasive expectations of the new land, says Zeruavel, had forced the new comers to relinquish their memories associated with the exilic past to affirm national revival especially during the pre-state years.
48 Cornel West, ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’, The Humanities as Social Technology 53 (1990): 19. West argues that the homogeneous practices are overruled by multiplicity and heterogeneity in the new cultural politics of difference. He advocates contextualization as pluralizing, provisional and tentative. This notion is referred to underline the multi-vocal subtexts employed by Oz in his presentation of spaces (exilic and home).
49 Oz, A T ale of Love and Darkness, 181.
50 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile,’ in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press: 2000), 173.
51 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 262.
52 Ibid., 182.
53 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 185.
54 Ibid.,169.
55 Edward Said, Out of Place (New York: Vintage, 1999), 294.
56 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1997), 107. Though not post-Zionist, Zerubavel argues that the Zionist grand narrative overlooked the social, political, cultural and economical differences of in the history of diasporic Jewish communities while establishing the divide between Exile and Antiquity.
57 Martin Adams, A Concise Introduction to Existential Counselling (Singapore: Sage Publications Asia-Pacific Ltd, 2013): 18–19. The interpretation the memoir based on the notion o f existential time takes its critical aspects from the difficulty to view time only in its fundamental aspect. Reflecting on Heidegger’s existential time, Adams discusses the inclusivity of a not gone past, past in the present and future in the present.
58 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 224.
59 Ibid., 219.
60 Ibid., 361.
61 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Digital, 2014), 7.
62 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 317.
63 Shapira, ‘Ha-sipu ha-tsiyoni shel Amos Oz’, 167.
64 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 325.
65 Ibid.,
66 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 371.
67 Ibid., 330.
68 Ibid., 330.
69 Ibid.,360.
70 Balaban, Between God and Beast, 179.
71 Amos Oz, ‘The Meaning of Homeland’, in Zionism: The Sequel, ed. Carol Diament (New York, 1998), 254. In this essay written in the aftermath of Six Day War, first published in the daily Davar, Oz marks his intellectual stance on the conflict, specifically on Zionist interventions. He states that he believes in a Zionism that does not see the Palestinian Arabs as a shapeless mass of humanity waiting for the Jews to form it. Oz advocates the recognition of Israel as a small tract of land home of two people fated to live facing each other.
72 Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, ‘100 Years of Zionism, 50 Years of a Jewish State’, Tikkun 13 (1998):68.
73 Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 195.
74 Amos Oz, The Amos Oz Reader, ed. Nitza Ben Dov, trans. Nicholas De Lange (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 184–6.
75 Ibid.
76 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 3.