Joseph's
Bookstore
1257 Finchley Road
Temple Fortune
London NW11 0AD
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Opening Hours:
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Opening Hours:
Fri: 10:00 - 17:00
All other days:
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The rest is
Commentary...
Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy!
Author of the Month for September 2007
| Amos Oz (born May 4, 1939), birth name Amos Klausner, is a
celebrated Israeli writer, novelist, and journalist, and frequent
guest to the store. He is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva. Since 1967, he has been a prominent advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was born in Jerusalem, where he grew up at No. 18 Amos Street in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood. Roughly half of his fiction is set within a mile of where he grew up. |
Amos Oz |
| His parents, Yehuda Arieh Klausner and Fania
Musman, were Zionist immigrants from Eastern Europe. His mother committed suicide when he was twelve, causing him repercussions that he would explore in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. He became a Labor Zionist and joined Kibbutz Hulda at the age of fourteen. At this time he changed his surname to "Oz", Hebrew for "strength". "Tel Aviv was not radical enough," he later said, "only the kibbutz was radical enough." However, by his own account he was "a disaster as a laborer... the joke of the kibbutz." He remained living and working on the kibbutz until he and his wife Nili moved to Arad in 1986; as his writing career flowered he was allowed to gradually decrease his time devoted to normal kibbutz work: the royalties from his writing produced sufficient income for the kibbutz to justify this. In his own words, he "became a branch of the farm". Oz studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University. Except for some short articles in the kibbutz newsletter and the newspaper Davar, he didn't publish anything until the age of 22, when he began to publish books. His first collection of stories Where the Jackal Howls appeared in 1965. His first novel Elsewhere, Perhaps was published in 1966. He began to write incessantly, publishing an average of one book per year. Oz was awarded his country’s most prestigious prize: the Israel Prize for Literature in 1998, the fiftieth anniversary year of Israel’s independence. In 2005, he was awarded the Goethe Cultural Award from the city of Frankfurt, Germany, a prestigious prize which was awarded in the past to the likes of Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann for his life's work. He has written 18 books in Hebrew, and about 450 articles and essays. His works have been translated into some 30 languages. Besides his fiction, Oz regularly publishes essays on the subjects of politics, literature, and peace. He has written extensively for the Israeli Labor newspaper Davar and (since the demise of Davar in the 1990s) for Yediot Achronot. In English, his non-fiction has appeared in various places, including the Guardian. |
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Essential Reading
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A Tale of Love and Darkness |
Tragic, comic and incomparable: an autobiographical epic and a comedie
humaine for our times, which is both the portrait of an artist and the story of the birth of a nation, spanning several generations and moving with them from Russia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, to Jerusalem. Love and darkness are just two of the powerful forces that run through Amos Oz's extraordinary, moving story. He takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's wartorn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. And at the tragic heart of the story is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half years old. Oz's story dives into 120 year of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Farce and heartbreak, history and humanity make up this magical portrait of the artist
who saw the birth of a nation, and came through its turbulent life as well as his own.
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An intimate, everyday tale of grief, unrequited love, attachment and loss through the voices of an irresistible range of characters. Told in beautiful, direct language, the story has universal and immediate appeal - surprising, heartbreaking, sexy, funny, and poetic. Reminiscent of Under Milk Wood for the range of its voices, its earthly humour and its poignancy, The Same Sea is pure joy to read, full of echoes and illusions yet with an astonishing immediacy and a powerful charge.
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My Michael
|
Set in Jerusalem at the time of the Suez crisis, this is a study of a
To Know a Woman
Following the bizarre accidental death of his wife, an Israeli secret agent retires to the suburbs. After a lifetime of uncovering other people's secrets, he is forced to look back at the lies he has told himself. Help Us to Divorce
In 'How To Cure a Fanatic' Amos Oz analyses the historical roots of violence and confronts truths about the extremism nurtured throughout society. By bringing us face to face with fanaticism he suggests ways in which we can all respond. In 'Help Us to Divorce' he convinces irrefutably that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is primarily a dispute over 'whose house this is'. In his characteristically lucid, intelligent and inspiring prose Amos Os is unafraid to advocate solutions to the dispute and to espouse his belief that there will, one day, be a resolution to the conflict. 'I'm no longer a European in any sense, except through the pain of my parents and my ancestors, who left forever in my genes a sense of unrequited love for Europe...But if I were a European, I'd be careful not to point the finger at anyone. Instead of calling the Israelis this name or the Palestinians that
name, I would do anything I could to help both sides, because both of them are on the verge of making the most painful decision of their history...You no longer have to choose between being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, you have to be pro-peace. Previous
Authors of the Month
Dan Jacobson
woman's retreat from an unhappy marriage into a private world of fantasy and repressed desires. Her subsequent mental breakdown is mirrored in the local scenes of disruption and violence caused by the coming war.
PB £7.99
PB £3.99
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Saul Bellow
Aharon Appelfeld
Howard Jacobson
Will Eisner
