![]() ![]() He had a weakness for everything grand, powerful and gleaming - military uniforms, brass bugles, banners and lances glinting in the sun, royal palaces and coats of arms. His grandfather, the follower of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the revisionist founding father of today's right-wing Israeli politics: "He was a nationalist, patriot, a lover of armies, victories and conquest, a passion-ate, innocent minded-hawk. ![]() His father, Ariyeh Klausner, the thwarted academic in a land stuffed with the over-qualified - "a sort of rootless, short-sighted intellectual with two left hands". I am a great admirer of Oz as a novelist, of his spare, quiet portraits of intimacy between couples, but here, in this long book, he reveals a huge talent for the big narrative picture, for Dickensian character portraits and an expert fusion of history and personal life.įrom the outset the family bears down on you. It is one of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read. Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, thought to be the biggest-selling literary work in Israeli history, is an exploration of why his mother killed herself, and the effect on him, a sensitive, intelligent boy growing up in Jerusalem during the last years of the British mandate and the war of independence. ![]()
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