Amos Oz
CONTEMPORARY HEBREW LITERATURE
I have second thoughts about the word "contemporary,"
which baffles me. Perhaps I should tell the story of modern Hebrew
literature, rather than pretend to sum it up and to squeeze it into
definitions and formulae: I am a storyteller, not a scholar. Now,
stories are never "contemporary"; not even if they are set in the
present time, not even when they are told in the present tense. A
story is bound, almost by definition, to relate to the past. Storytellers
are cripples, monsters really, born with their necks and faces turned
backwards.
Of course, we all know of poets and storytellers who have had
amazing revelations about the future, verging sometimes on the
prophetic, writers who foresaw way ahead of ideologists and
politicians (not that I regard being ahead of ideologists and politi–
cians such a big deal). But even those who had this "infrared"
capacity for piercing the darkness of the future and for reading for–
tunes in advance, like Dostoyevsky or Kafka, even they were
monsters with turned-back necks and faces. It was only through some
mysterious looking glass which they have found somewhere in the
past, that they were able to peep into some of what was yet to come.
But just how far into the past do I go? Where does my story
proper begin?
The easiest thing to do is just to discuss a number of significant
recent Hebrew books, and then perhaps give some plot summaries.
And then put it all in a familiar context: call this and that
"expressionist," "existentialist," "political," and so on. I might be
expected to say who exactly is Israel's Saul Bellow, who is Garcia
Marquez, who resembles Gunter Grass, who are the Pounds, the
Eliots, or the Solzhenitsyns in our little Israeli village. I admit that
this is a tempting way.
It
could be fun. In fact, I sometimes tend to
amuse people who are just faintly familiar with Israel's literary scene
by telling them that this scene is much like that of a continuing
earthquake, with various geological stratas exposed to be watched
simultaneously: if you hit the right cafe in Tel Aviv at the right time
