The Tumultuous Life and Nuanced Work of Israel’s Greatest Children’s Book Writer

After tragedy, Dvora Omer found flaws, beauty in the nation’s founding figures, turning them into literary heroes

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet
There are many different ways to be dumb about literature. When you’re in high school, the men and women who teach it to you—sometimes passionate and sweet, too often underpaid, insecure, and sour—insist that your primary task as a reader is to decipher the hidden meanings that the author weaved throughout the text like a serial killer leaving behind clues to taunt his weary pursuers. When you’re in college, the men and women who teach it to you—also underpaid, also probably sour—turn their attention from text to author, wrestling the creative spirit down to the therapist’s couch and squeezing it until, anguished, it is ready to cry uncle, or, more likely, mother. Both approaches are vile and joyless, but when it comes to Dvora Omer—the great Israeli writer of novels for young adults who passed away earlier this year—they seem inevitable: More than those of any other writer I can think of, Omer’s life and work are best understood as threads of the same tale, an epic poem of sacrifice and betrayal on which all Israeli children were reared.

Omer was born in a northern kibbutz in 1932, and her parents divorced when she was an infant, her father moving to another kibbutz and marrying another woman. He would visit his firstborn infrequently, once every few months, each visit culminating in the little girl sobbing and begging him to stay. He never did. Then, Omer’s mother died when the future literary lioness was only 11 years old. At the time, she was told that her mother was unhappy and had shot herself. At the funeral, Dvora was ordered to stop crying, as weakness was unbecoming of true and tough kibbutzniks. If that wasn’t enough, Galia, her caretaker at the kibbutz, disappeared shortly thereafter, leaving Omer all alone.

She took to writing, making up fantastical tales in which everyone was happy and no one was dead. Her teachers told her that her stories were horrible, often adding that she had no talent and urging her to abandon her literary ambitions for more useful tasks like cooking or cleaning. Omer, however, persevered: In 1959, after a stint as a teacher, she published her first book, The Pages of Tamar, a novel in diary form detailing the everyday life of a perfectly normal girl from a perfectly normal family living in a fictitious kibbutz. It was a hit. Tamar and her tightly knit clan were for Israelis what the Ingalls family had been for Americans—a shamelessly romanticized and utterly charming account of frontier life that was both an operatic celebration of the nation’s founding pioneers and an intimate portrayal of daily life in harsh conditions.
 
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