The Israeli literary giant Amos Oz has died of cancer at the age of 79. At the news of his death, Israel’s president hailed…
The Israeli literary giant Amos Oz has died of cancer at the age of 79. At the news of his death, Israel’s president hailed Oz as the „glory“ of the nation’s writers.
Oz was the author of dozens of Hebrew-language novels, novellas, short stories and essays, including his bestselling autobiographical novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness. That work chronicles Oz’s life in Israel, from his childhood in Jerusalem through the birth of the Jewish state and its transformation into a modern nation.
Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem in 1939, into a right-wing Zionist family in what was then Mandatory Palestine. His father, Yehuda Klausner, and mother, Fania Mussman Klausner, had fled anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.
Oz’s uncle was a noted linguist; his father, a librarian who wrote at night. In a 2004 interview with NPR’s Jennifer Ludden, Oz recalled „bookshelves, lines and lines and lines of books in languages I couldn’t read“ as the landscape of his childhood.
Oz called the language in which he wrote, modern Hebrew, his „musical instrument“ and compared it to molten lava.
