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60 ฀ 3฀ Desert฀Space฀and฀฀ National฀Consciousness Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes. —Italo Calvino The act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all. A selfish happiness perhaps, but it is happiness—for him who knows how to appreciate it. To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world. —Isabelle Eberhardt Any analysis of the vital cultural role played by the disruptive signifier of “desert” in the Israeli literary setting, or the Jewish canon itself, would hardly be complete without considering the rich fictional universe of Amos Oz (b. 1939). One of the most widely read Israeli novelists of his or any generation, Oz always proves a highly rewarding writer to examine in relation to the pervasive and permanent antagonism of the settled and unsettled, the occupied and the occupier. He is, after all, the writer the Guardian once hailed as “the desert conscience of Israel.” With the possible exception of A. B. Yehoshua, Oz, who calls the small Negev town of Arad home, is the most translated and critically esteemed Israeli novelist. A favorite target of attack by Israel’s ultranationalist Right during the years of Israel’s occupation of Lebanon and more recently during the Intifada that has raged in the Palestinian territories, at such moments Oz has often stood in the international community as Israel’s 03.60-95.Omer.indd฀฀฀60 12/8/05฀฀฀3:05:04฀PM ฀ Desert฀Space฀and฀National฀Consciousness฀ 61 moral conscience. American and European newspapers often highlight his response to tumultuous events such as the assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and he has won prestigious literary prizes both at home and abroad. Wherever one might look throughout his far-ranging oeuvre, Oz offers highly inventive responses to Israel’s existential difficulties. Whether in his political essays or fiction, one finds a penetrating iteration of the quotidian aspects of Israeli life—as well as its intractable violent conflicts and historical upheavals. Oz exemplifies a generation that consciously distanced itself from an earlier generation’s solidarity with the prevailing public line (a struggle that serves as a classical confirmation of Harold Bloom’s idea concerning the writer’s Oedipal revolt against writers of preceding generations) and collectively sanctioned ideas.1 A formidable influence among the New Wave Hebrew literature (1960s–70s) and still a vital presence in Israel’s literary scene, Oz spent his childhood in Jerusalem , his formative years in Kibbutz Hulda, and has resided since 1982 in the desert development town of Arad. This trajectory has made him into a kind of Israeli everyman. Moreover, having experienced Jerusalem as a divided city and serving in a tank unit in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, Oz displays an intimate understanding of the movement of Israeli society during critical times of transition. In his works readers encounter the social transition of the Jewish state from a collectivist organism to a socially critical democracy and finally to an increasingly Americanized and, hence, individualistic capitalist state troubled by deep ethnic, religious, and ideological fissures. Indeed, the novelist’s rebellion against his father’s religious Jerusalem household when he was only fifteen mirrors the path taken by many of his alienated characters and reflects the tension between the individual and the collective which has informed his oeuvre ever since. As he wrote in his autobiographical epic, A Tale of Love and Darkness: “I stood up and killed my father, and killed the whole of Jerusalem, changed my name and went on my own to Kibbutz Hulda, to live there above the ruins” (464). A number of critics have offered interesting perspectives on Oz’s dialogic encounters with the Hebrew Bible and its bearing on the contemporary Israeli reality. Joseph Cohen asserts that Oz’s singular achievement resides “in his bypassing polemicism to move upward to a substantially higher plateau of metapolitical writing. . . . Oz is nothing less than a modern mythmaker who has been highly successful in taking the exoticism of Israel’s location in the desert and Mediterranean Sea, a country already saturated with a biblical, mystical, apocalyptic and miraculous history, and combining it with the myriad realities of contemporary life” 03.60-95.Omer.indd฀฀฀61 12/8/05฀฀฀3:05:04฀PM [18.191.240.243] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 02:24...

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