What Amos Oz Couldn't See

Amos Oz wrote that as a child he would imagine his own funeral. It would be a state funeral, with eulogies by politicians, "marble statues and songs of praise in my memory," he recalled in his 2002 memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He was not far off the mark. Oz died in late December 2018 at the age of seventy-nine as one of Israel's most celebrated writers—per-haps its last "national" writer, for no other contemporary Israeli author has as insistently, or successfully, grafted their own biography onto the country's history.