Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories


Book Description

Amos Oz's first book: a disturbing and beautiful collection of short stories about kibbutz life. Written in the '60s, these eight stories convey the tension and intensity of feeling in the founding period of Israel, a brand-new state with an age-old history.







Howl like a Wolf!


Book Description

Gold Mom's Choice Award Winner Creative Child Magazine Book of the Year Award Winner What does it feel like to “see” with your ears like a bat or go through a full body transformation like a frog? Can you wriggle in and out of tight places like an octopus, camouflage yourself like a leopard, or do a waggle dance like a honeybee? This creative and beautifully illustrated interactive guide makes learning about animals fun for children ages 6 and up. Fifteen animals explain their amazing feats and invite kids to enter their world by mimicking their behavior — an imaginative approach to learning that fosters curiosity, empathy, and dramatic play.




Elsewhere, Perhaps


Book Description

Novel of the microcosmic world of a kibbutz community located near the Jordanian frontier.




The Amos Oz Reader


Book Description

A rich and varied selection of writings from the early sixties to the present by Amos Oz, one of Israel s leading novelists, public intellectuals, and political activists. The Amos Oz Reader draws on Oz's entire body of work and is loosely grouped into four themes: the kibbutz, the city of Jerusalem, the idea of a "promised land," and his own life story. Included are excerpts from his celebrated novels, among them Where the Jackals Howl, A Perfect Peace, My Michael, Fima, Black Box, and To Know a Woman. Nonfiction is represented by selections from Under This Blazing Light, The Slopes of Lebanon, In the Land of Israel, and Oz s masterpiece, A Tale of Love and Darkness. With an illuminating introduction by Robert Alter. Praise for A Tale of Love and Darkness "A[n] ingenious work that circles around the rise of a state, the tragic destiny of a mother, a boy s creation of a new self." The New Yorker "Detailed and beautiful As he writes about himself and his family, Oz is also writing part of the history of the Jews." Los Angeles Times AMOS OZ is a prize-winning novelist and essayist whose honors include the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters. Most recently, his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, received the Koret Jewish Book Award. He lives in Arad. NITZA BEN-DOV is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Haifa University, as well as a scholar of biblical poetics. ROBERT ALTER is an esteemed scholar and translator. His recent translations include The Book of Psalms and The Five Books of Moses. "




Between God and Beast


Book Description

In Between God and Beast, Avraham Balaban argues that Oz's fiction has, from the outset, followed Jung's psychological theory. The major psychic processes that are depicted throughout Oz's prose are typically Jungian. For example, the treasure hunt, which is the deep structure of many of Oz's stories and novels, reflects the search for the "self" in which all the vying forces of one's psyche coexist peacefully. Oz uses many of the symbols of the treasure as well as of the self as they are presented by Jung. Many of the symbols examined in this study have never before been discussed in articles about Oz's writings. Balaban also devotes a considerable portion of his study to the religious dimension of Oz's work as well as the impact of his personal life on his writings. Balaban reveals that from the beginning Oz's work has moved in two directions: it demonstrates an unceasing effort to delve ever deeper into the dark side of consciousness while heightening the contrast between the opposing elements vying within his protagonists; and it consistently attempts to bring those oppositions to peaceful coexistence and even to a fruitful mutual relationship.




Pragmatic-Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Amos Oz's Writings


Book Description

Pragmatic-Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Amos Oz’s Writings: Words Significantly Uttered presents intermediate links between three intellectual domains: the literary works of Amos Oz, American Pragmatism, and object-relations psychoanalysis. The interdisciplinary method employed here involves a presentation of Oz’s writings as the starting point for an existential debate that addresses a mental-conceptual struggle. This conceptual conflict, which has been given aesthetic shape in the literary work, inspires the presentation of central pragmatic and psychoanalytic concepts which contribute to a new and richer understanding of the conceptual tension or existential challenge. The chapters interpret Oz’s works not only as literary masterpieces but as existential-philosophical expressions. Dorit Lemberger’s argues that Oz reconceptualizes psychological, personal, familial, and often national, processes in a way that allows readers to understand such processes in general life from a retrospective perspective.




Dear Zealots


Book Description

The acclaimed author presents “three passionate lectures about the state of politics in Israel” in this “humorous, mournful, enraged, and uplifting” volume (Kirkus). A National Jewish Book Award Finalist Israeli author Amos Oz has won numerous awards for his novels capturing the cultural and political complexities of his country, including the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the Primo Levi Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award. But these essays on the universal nature of fanaticism and its possible cures, on the Jewish roots of humanism and the need for a secular pride in Israel, and on the geopolitical standing of Israel in the wider Middle East and internationally, “may contain his most urgent message yet.” (Ruth Eglash, Washington Post). These essays were written, Oz states, “first and foremost” for his grandchildren: they are a patient, learned telling of history, religion, and politics, to be thumbed through and studied, clung to even, as we march toward an uncertain future. “Concise, evocative . . . Dear Zealots is not just a brilliant book of thoughts and ideas—it is a depiction of one man’s struggle, who for decades has insisted on keeping a sharp, strident and lucid perspective in the face of chaos and at times of madness.” —David Grossman, winner of the Man Booker International Prize




Voices of Israel


Book Description

Cohen takes an in-depth critical look at three novelists and two poets who stand at the forefront of contemporary Israeli literature, and whose works have been widely read, studied, and admired in the Western world. The critiques examine all English translations of these Israeli writers' major works from the beginning of their careers up to the present. Cohen demonstrates the vitality and virtuosity of the so-called New Wave Israeli writers whose sources and influences are as ancient as the stories of the Hebrew Bible and as modern as the interiorization of reality found in Proust, Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce; and the literary adaptation of relativity found in Borges, Lowry, and Durrell. Complementing the critiques are interviews with the five Israeli writers. The issues discussed—the relation of politics and literature, the influence of literature on life, the role of the writer in society, the moral responsibility of the writer—combine with the essays to provide comprehensive insight into the contemporary Israeli psyche.




Scenes from Village Life


Book Description

Linked short stories set in a town in the midst of change: “One of the most powerful books you will read about present-day Israel.” —The Jewish Chronicle “‘Scenes from Village Life’ is like a symphony, its movements more impressive together than in isolation. There is, in each story, a particular chord or strain; but taken together, these chords rise and reverberate, evoking an unease so strong it’s almost a taste in the mouth . . . ‘Scenes from Village Life’ is a brief collection, but its brevity is a testament to its force. You will not soon forget it.” —The New York Times Book Review Strange things are happening in Tel Ilan, a century-old pioneer village. A disgruntled retired politician complains to his daughter that he hears the sounds of digging at night. Could it be their tenant, that young Arab? But then the young Arab hears the digging sounds too. And where has the mayor’s wife gone, vanished without a trace, her note saying “Don’t worry about me”? Around the village, the veneer of new wealth—gourmet restaurants, art galleries, a winery—barely conceals the scars of war and of past generations: disused air-raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped. Scenes From Village Life is a memorable novel in stories by the inimitable Amos Oz: a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life. Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange “Finely wrought . . . Oz writes characterizations that are subtle but surgically precise, rendering this work a powerfully understated treatment of an uneasy Israeli conscience.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Informed by everything, weighed down by nothing, this is an exquisite work of art.” —The Scotsman