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Starred review from November 15, 2004
This memoir/family history brims over with riches: metaphors and poetry, drama and comedy, failure and success, unhappy marriages and a wealth of idiosyncratic characters. Some are lions of the Zionist movement—David Ben-Gurion (before whom a young Oz made a terrifying command appearance), novelist S.Y. Agnon, poet Saul Tchernikhovsky—others just neighbors and family friends, all painted lovingly and with humor. Though set mostly during the author's childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940s and '50s, the tale is epic in scope, following his ancestors back to Odessa and to Rovno in 19th-century Ukraine, and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove them with their families to Palestine in the early 1930s. In a rough, dusty, lower-middle-class suburb of Jerusalem, both of Oz's parents found mainly disappointment: his father, a scholar, failed to attain the academic distinction of his uncle, the noted historian Joseph Klausner. Oz's beautiful, tender mother, after a long depresson, committed suicide when Oz (born in 1939) was 12. By the age of 14, Oz was ready to flee his book-crammed, dreary, claustrophobic flat for the freedom and outdoor life of Kibbutz Hulda. Oz's personal trajectory is set against the background of an embattled Palestine during WWII, the jubilation after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the violence and deprivations of Israel's war of independence and the months-long Arab siege of Jerusalem. This is a powerful, nimbly constructed saga of a man, a family and a nation forged in the crucible of a difficult, painful history.
August 1, 2004
Award-winning Israeli author Oz (The Same Sea), whose childhood ambition was to be a book, has constructed a memoir full of family wisdom, history, and culture. Oz's father was a librarian and, like his mother, a member of the local literary community. In the 1940s, a time of great upheaval in Jerusalem, young Oz believed that if he were a book there would be a good chance that one copy of him would survive and "find a safe place on some godforsaken bookshelf." The influence of Oz's parents on his career as a writer dominates this warm, funny, personal history; a standout anecdote involves Oz's grandfather, who revealed to his grandson the key to being admired by many women: be a good listener. As much as this distinguished book details the lives of the Oz family, it also captures the history of Israel. For biography, literature, and history collections in academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/04.] Joyce Sparrow, Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas Cty., FL
Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from October 15, 2004
" Living to Tell the Tale" [BKL O 15 03], Oz's panoramic memoir enhances the history of literature and of Israel, and the literature of examined lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)
June 1, 2004
Darkness, indeed. Prize-winning novelist Oz grew up in war-ravaged Jerusalem with his battling parents, then fled to a kibbutz after his mother's suicide, changing his name and starting a whole new life.
Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.