The novelist who probed Israel’s contradictions

Amos Oz was hailed as the conscience of Israel, even as he evolved into one of his country’s fiercest dissenters. The author of more than 30 Hebrewlanguage books—including his acclaimed 1968 novel My Michael, about a disintegrating marriage in 1950s Jerusalem, and the bestselling 2002 memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness— Oz probed the contradictions of the Jewish state and its people. A proud Zionist, he was nonetheless a vociferous opponent of the settlement of Palestinian territories. “I love Israel,” he said in 2016, “but I don’t like it very much.” A frequent critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s increasing conservatism, Oz welcomed his own vilification by Israel’s right wing. “Sometimes—not always, but sometimes,” he said, “the title ‘traitor’ can be worn as a badge of honor.”

He was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem; his grandparents “were Zionists who had moved from Eastern Europe to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine,” said The Washington Post. His father, a librarian, read 17 languages but insisted his son speak only Hebrew. His mother, a scholar, committed suicide when Oz was 12, a tragedy that would echo in his often melancholic writing. “Without a wound,” he once said, “there is no author.” Rebelling against his right-wing intellectual father, he ran away to a kibbutz in central Israel at age 14 and renamed himself Oz, Hebrew for “strength.” “I wanted to become a simple, dumb tractor driver,” he said. “But I began to write secretly. I couldn’t resist it.” He remained at the kibbutz until 1986, dividing his time between writing, farming, and teaching at the community’s school. Oz fought with a tank unit in the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars— experiences that left him with facial scars and the belief that only a two-state solution would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Staunchly secular, Oz advocated for an Israel “defined by humanistic Jewish culture, not only by Jewish religion and nationality,” said The

New York Times. As liberal Zionism fell out of vogue over the past decade, he became “an increasingly lonely voice,” said The Times (U.K.). Yet his final collection of essays, Dear Zealots, published last year, reflected “his strong belief that a better future was still possible” for Israel. “What I have seen here in my life,” he wrote, “is far less and far more than what my parents and their parents dreamed of.”