Amos Oz, 74 Years Old and a National Treasure, Still Dreams of Life on the Kibbutz

In a wide-ranging conversation, Israel’s greatest novelist talks about working the land, making art, and Natalie Portman

By Vox Tablet

There’s no other living Israeli author who is as well known around the world as Amos Oz. Inside Israel, he’s one of the country’s most respected cultural figures. Oz has lived a tumultuous life. When he was 10 years old, he witnessed the founding of the Jewish state. When he was 12 years old, his mother committed suicide. When he was 15, he joined a kibbutz and changed his last name to Oz, Hebrew for “strength.” He eventually left the kibbutz for the desert because of his son’s asthma, but as he tells Vox Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin, he still dreams of kibbutz life at least once a week. In his newest short story collection, Between Friends, he revisits the early years of the kibbutz, when the collective farms were still a wild Israeli ideological experiment. Estrin sat with Amos Oz in his home in Tel Aviv for a far-ranging discussion about the new book, his love of Hebrew, his predictions for Israel’s future, and a bit of celebrity gossip. [Running time: 27:45.]

Click here to listen.

101 Great Jewish Books

A catalog of the works that shape the Jewish mind in America today

Welcome to Tablet's list of 101 Great Jewish Books--works that, taken together, define the living Jewish cultural inheritance in America today.

Before we explain what the list is, we should tell you what it’s not: It’s not a list of “The Greatest Jewish Books of All Time,” an undertaking that would involve sifting through thousands of texts in dozens of languages produced over the course of millennia and that could only result in either a Cecil B. DeMille-like cast of thousands or a list with one entry: the Bible. What we wanted to create was a library of works that have actually moved us and shaped the way we understand ourselves as Jewish human beings in the world. We read some of these books as children; some we read under our covers as teenagers; some we got off college syllabi; some we discovered, with wonder and awe and surprise, as adults. But all are books of supreme importance in shaping our lives and our understanding of the different ways one might be a Jew in the world—whether the authors are religious Jews, or secular Jews, or not Jewish by your definition or someone else’s definition, or by any definition at all.

When it came to organizing the list, we thought about what these books meant to us and soon came up with the metaphor of the human mind. Just as each one of the brains individual lobes is useless except as a part of the grander whole, these categories, too, are meant to serve not as hard barriers but rather as points of connection and contemplation. More than a few decisions here will raise eyebrows—why, for example, is Portnoy’s Complaint filed not under the Laughing & Complaining category but under Appetites? Why is Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl not in Suffering & Loss? The answer in all cases is that we tried to place each book according to what felt for us to be its most generative material. Some of you, we know, will disagree, and others will question the very categories themselves. That, we think, is exactly the point of putting out lists.

In order to be included, a book had to meet three requirements:

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The Hidden One of N.J.: Why Dara Horn Is the Best of the New Breed of Jewish Novelists

Her fourth novel, ‘A Guide for the Perplexed,’ reanimates the past without falling into the traps of ‘Shtetlworld’ nostalgia

By Saul Austerlitz for Tablet

Dara Horn’s home, like her life, has two levels. On the higher level are rooms full of toy dinosaurs and Babar posters. On the lower one, shelves full of Yiddish and Hebrew books and Zambian carvings and wooden panels from China do battle with water guns and baby bottles. “I live a double life,” she said as she provided me with the abbreviated grand tour of her Essex County, N.J., home. “I think all parents have a double life.” Horn’s double life is just a bit more double than most other parents’; perhaps we can call it her quadruple life. The relevant statistics: age 36; four children; and, with the publication of her new book, A Guide for the Perplexed, four novels.

In addition to two levels, Horn also has two desks. The first, in her bedroom, is home to a haphazard pile of books and school forms and cover mockups. The second is in her living room and is completely bare except for a slim laptop. Horn prefers working at her second desk, where the everyday concerns of her other life can be temporarily left behind. Her work day lasts from 9:30 until 2:30, when her children finish school, and she heads off in her minivan, outfitted with four car seats, to pick them up. On this midsummer day, though, her kids are in camp, and the workday has been extended for an additional hour.

***

Inspired by the stranger-than-fiction story of the Cairo geniza, an archive of a millennium’s worth of letters, documents, and religious texts discovered in a Cairo synagogue in the late 19th century, A Guide for the Perplexed alternates among three interlocking stories.

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A Simulated Diary of a Jewish Hamburger

An Internet diary that, instead of serving news and musings, takes you moment by moment through an 80-year-old story: this is the vision of Swedish novelist, pilot, and documentarian Torkel S. Wächter, mastermind behind the literature and family history project On This Day 80 Years Ago.
Compelled to investigate what happened to his German-Jewish grandfather after the Nazis took power, Wächter uncovered a huge trove of documents in his parents' attic. The sprawling, hybrid result of his findings brings to light the suddenly altered course of one family’s history.
On This Day, the companion to Wächter's 32 Postkarten, follows Gustav Wächter, a Jewish senior tax inspector, and his family during Hitler's rise to power, from January through July 1933. As the situation in his native Hamburg grows tense, the behavior of Wächter's colleagues and friends changes according to their political loyalties. Eventually, his superior is forced to write a report that dismisses Wächter from government service, and each of his sons is blacklisted.
The site offers an innovative model for engaging history—through family, technology, and writing—and makes for a fascinating, if difficult, read.
- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

Freud’s Jewish Mistress

Vienna, 1895. Minna Bernays, a laughably incompetent lady's companion, moves in with her sister Martha and Martha's husband, Sigmund Freud. Freud, a 39-year-old struggling professor of the fledgling field of psychotherapy, is charmed by the intellectually-minded Minna, who attends to the Freuds' 6 children and, owing in part to her fascination with her brother-in-law's work, begins enjoying his romantic attention as well.

Or at least that's how Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman tell it in their new novel, Freud's Mistress. Whether or not Sigmund and Minna actually entered into a sexual relationship has long been debated. But a 2006 discovery of a Swiss hotel log showing that the pair once checked into a hotel room as husband and wife offers some fairly convincing evidence.

While the authors do an impressive job evoking late 19th-century Vienna, the most remarkable aspect of this novel is meeting Sigmund Freud, lover.

Can we really come to embrace the father of psychology as a character who says things like, "I will indeed unlock the mystery of your dreams. And you, my dear"? Well…now that we think about it—maybe we can.

- Elie Lichtschein for Jewniverse