Eugene Goodheart
AN INTERVIEW WITH AMOS OZ
Amos Oz lives in Hulda, a thriving kibbutz not jarjrom Tel Aviv.
My wife and I arrived at Hulda in
1981
on a bright March Sunday morning (a
work day in Israel) andjound ourselves among busy workmen. A worker in a
hard hat pointed to a man who would show us the way to Oz's study. Our
guide, short, unassuming and jriendly, turned out to be General Israel Tal, a
deputy difense minister oj the Israeli government and, according to Oz, the
world's leading authority on tank warfare. Tal is a sympathizer w ith the Peace
Now movement, oj which Oz is a member. Young, well-built and ruggedly
handsome, Oz greeted us with an old-world courtesy and excused himselfjor
having to delay
rrry
interview with him. H e and Tal had something to talk over.
My wife and I sat on the soja, while the two men talked. From time to time Tal
would interrupt the conversation, conducted in H ebrew (which we did not
understand), and ask us in English about our trip to Israel. Wiry, he asked me,
had it taken me so long to make
rrry
first trip to Israel? H e did not wait jor an
answer and guessed with absolute accuracy that I was a New Yorker jrom a
radical Yiddishist anti-Zionist background and that
rrry
resistance to visiting
Israel took longer to overcome than my commitment to radical ideology. H e
asked me whether I had come to talk to Oz about literature and w hen I said
literature and politics, he smiled and said that Oz had great political capacity,
but he had urged him to stay out oj politics, so that he couLd devote himself to
what was eternal (art) rather than to what was transient (politics). This mild–
mannered man in civilian clothes with an avuncular smile, the jather oj the
Israeli tank, had travelled to the study oj ayoung novelist to discuss the state oj
the union; he had expressed himself on the eternal value oj art. One could expect
to find such a combination oj events in an improbable fiction or in the reality oj
the State
oj
Israel.
Eugene Goodheart:
I read your books
My Michael
and
The Hill oj Evil
Counsel
shortly after my arrival here in J erusalem and found the
evocation of the city very moving. I now see the city partly
through the eyes of
My Michael.
The sense of the biblical past and
the immed iate heroic past is very strong but it's coupled with a
disturbing and pervasive feeling of melancholy and longing. I was
