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PARTISAN REVIEW
your parents were all about. You turn your head backwards and
suddenly see yourself behind your own shoulder.
ASG:
What was your father's field of scholarship?
AO:
He wrote a number of scholarly books on comparative literature.
He was a linguist and a researcher of traveling motifs - that is,
literary motifs traveling between various literatures . He spent most
of his life as a librarian. When he graduated from the University of
Jerusalem in the early 1930s, there were, I believe, more professors
than students of comparative literature in Jerusalem, with all those
German refugees, so he never quite made it to being a university lec–
turer.
ASG:
In some of your interviews you mentioned that you weren't
taught any foreign language as a small child, although your father
was fluent in fifteen. When did you start learning foreign languages?
AO:
It's not quite true. As a small child I could say, "Yes," "No," and
"British go home" in English - and that screaming rather than say–
ing- but that was just about my entire vocabulary until I was eleven
or twelve, when I started English in school. I was privileged to have
a sweet little English teacher in my kibbutz secondary school, a
Hungarian lady who had never set foot in any English-speaking
country but was nonetheless the most Anglophile of all Anglophiles.
Every flaw in my accent I should probably blame her for, but then,
because of my feelings for English, I should be grateful to her.
ASG:
What about the dedication of your novel
Elsewhere, Perhaps
to
your mother?
AO:
My mother died when I was twelve or so, and
Elsewhere, Perhaps
was my first novel. My mother was a great reader. I knew she had a
special thing about novels. More than just once when I was a kid she
expressed the hope that one day I would write a novel- which I in–
tended to do anyway, since I was five or so. So again, it was only
natural to dedicate
Elsewhere, Perhaps
to her memory.
ASG:
Was she not at home in Israeli society? I get the sense that in
many of your stories there are women who are unhappy, refugees
who can't rcally accustom themselves to being in Israel.
AO:
The short answer to your question is yes, you are right, and the
long one would take me a trilogy to expound. I am not quite through
with that, so you have the short one. Then, you know, the very term
"happiness" is somewhat alien to me: the more I think about it, the
more I tend to believe that happiness is a Christian concept. Even
the word "happiness" cannot be properly translated into Hebrew.
We Hebrew speakers have a term which means joy-"simcha," but
