Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s a spectacularly good book. I could have chosen any number of Oz’s novels but preferred this recent memoir for its portrayal of the documentary reality of growing up in Israel in the earliest days of the Jewish state. Very little reality is absorbed from Israel and Palestine. It is always filtered through expectation and prejudice. It would be useful for everyone to read this book and absorb the reality and see what Israel is like as a real place.
Your next book, Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, takes us from history to something altogether more personal.
I have to tell you this is a spectacularly good book. I could have chosen any number of Oz novels but preferred this recent memoir for its portrayal of the documentary reality of growing up in Israel in the earliest days of the Jewish state. It is set in Palestine just after the war before the Jewish state. His book makes the place seem real. Very little reality is absorbed from Israel and Palestine. It is always filtered through expectation and prejudice. And that includes the people who visit every day, the diasporas of both communities. It’s one of the reasons it is an unsolvable problem because the diaspora communities are incapable of seeing the situation through any kind of real or truthful perception.
So, with this book, here is this world of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in the 40s and 50s. That same kind of knee-jerk reaction people had to Hess exists today, particularly with people in Europe. Everything Israel does is wrong and it would be useful for everyone to read this book and absorb the reality and see what Israel is like as a real place.
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Michael Goldfarb is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He has covered conflicts and conflict resolution from Bosnia to Iraq, primarily for America’s public radio system. His work has been given the highest honours, including the DuPont-Columbia Award, on both sides of the Atlantic. He has also been a Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government. His first book, Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005.
