Moment Magazine Book Club

Welcome to the Moment Magazine Book Club!

The May/June selection is A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange, Harvest Books/Harcourt Press, 2004

Amos Oz weaves two stories in this powerful memoir. One is of his parents and their friends who left an intellectually and culturally stimulating but anti-Semitic Europe to live in the rough and tumble of 1930s Jerusalem. The second is the autobiography of Amos Klausner, a lonely child, whose pedantic father is "an innocent-minded hawk" and whose frequently sad, depressed mother fills his young head with tales of fantasies. The boy, born in 1939, grows up during the last days of the British mandate and the first years of the Jewish state, in a milieu populated by now-legendary characters like Menachem Begin, David Ben Gurion and S.Y. Agnon and including the poet Zelda who was his beloved second grade teacher.

The memoir's darkness primarily derives from his mother's suicide when he is 12 years old. The pain drives him to Kibbutz Hulda where inspired by his reading of Hebrew translation of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, he remakes himself into the prolific writer Amos Oz. Equally important, the young militant who enters the kibbutz emerges from its fields as a founder the Israeli group Shalom Achshav (Peace Now). Honest, tragic, comic, revealing and complex, A Tale of Love and Darkness intertwines Oz's personal journey with the achievements and the mighty problems the State of Israel. The nation's and the writer's history are explored with an intensity and eloquence to be expected from this master of words.

—Susan Willens

Discussion Questions

1. In the first pages, Amos Oz sets up contrasts: between the cramped apartment and the hillside, the longing for Europe and life in Jerusalem, the neighborhoods  of  Kerem Avraham and “leafy Rehavia,” and the “Tolstoyan” neighbors and “the
worldatlarge.” How do these contrasts shape the young Amos Klausner?

2. How does this memoir affect your understanding of Israel’s history? Remember his descriptions of Palestine before 1949, the war for independence, the political  turmoil, and his Kibbutz Hulda. What was new to you in his recollections?

3. The suicide of the author’s mother stuns the reader. How do you understand its consequences in Oz's life? He says he rarely spoke of it until the publication of   this memoir. How do his silence and the elapsed years affect his telling of  this  memory?

4. Oz’s aunt,says “The only journey from which you don’t always come back   empty-handed is the journey inside yourself.” How do you describe Oz's journey? the reader 's journey?

5. If members of your group have read Amos Oz’s novels and/or stories, they might describe elements of the memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness that recur in his  fiction. How does he transform his own life story when he makes literary art of it?

6. Think of what you learn from  ATale of Love and Darkness as a series of   contrasts: immigrants vs. sabra, kibbutznik vs. urban intellectual, Arab vs. Jew,   myth vs. reality, then vs. now. Has the author resolved these contrasts in his life?

7. How does the ending of  A Tale of Love and Darkness  affect you as a reader? as a Jew?

Return to this page soon for more information about starting and maintaining a book club.

Read about the March-April selection, Bee Season by Myla Goldberg.

Read about the January-February selection, Night by Elie Wiesel.