Israelis can barely remember the country without the strong, eternal presence of Amos Oz.
It is hard to explain now Oz's great burst into the public consciousness – literary as well as political – in the mid-1960s, just before the 1967 Six-Day War.
When his books "Where the Jackals Howl" (1965) and "Elsewhere, Perhaps" (1966) came out, every teen and pre-teen knew that a new cultural hero had been born. These two books, especially the second one, caused a sensation in the kibbutz world. I remember a young Amos Oz, not yet 30, arriving at our kibbutz to give a lecture and hold a discussion with the older members about why he had given himself the right to expose the kibbutz in such a critical light.
Oz's miracle was that his next book, "My Michael," published in 1968, was no less good – in fact, it seemed to reach a new literary height.
For 50 years, "My Michael" has been seen as one of Oz's greatest creations. For the past 20, the constant discussion of a Nobel Prize for Oz always referenced "My Michael," and only later "A Tale of Love and Darkness." At one point, there was a sense that he would be awarded the prize, but the Swedes did not give it to him.
Oz was an Israeli cultural symbol. He embodied the dream of the handsome sabra (Israeli-born Jew). He knew how to treat the Israeli socialist homeland with humor and irony, but at the same time he romanticized the world that was disintegrating before his eyes. In 1980, he spoke at the funeral of Palmach commander Yigal Allon, describing Allon's world as completely different from the one the members of the new guard who had come to pay their respects to Allon represented with their suits and ties.
Anyone who followed Oz's life and his literary activity could not help but feel that he was standing in the heart of a stormy region, rocked by one earthquake after another from the Syrian-African Rift. In his novel "A Perfect Peace" (1982), he shaped the image of former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol as a kind of fortress. For him, Eshkol was the antithesis of David Ben-Gurion.
It would be incorrect to define Oz as having become an "oppositionist" starting in 1977, when the Likud party was first voted into power. Prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he was already accusing the Labor party of being "pulled to the right" and describing Israel as "a land that had such a lofty flight path and is now in such a sharp descent."
When Menachem Begin was prime minister, Oz led a cultural-political movement in which a group of writers turned into the leaders of an anti-Likud protest movement. Its platform was "Peace Now." Oz's speeches were always the main event at Peace Now demonstrations. On those stages, Oz informed Begin that "Hitler is already dead" and also attacked the settler movement as a "messianic cult."
Some said he was a magician of words. But he was also a person who could not be ignored. Following the 2015 election, he launched a dialogue with right-wing figures in an attempt to calm down social friction. He reported that figures such as former Meretz party head Zehava Galon and himself were under threat by people who would even show up at their homes. Just as he said of Eshkol, he too will become a literary fortress with wind whistling through cracks in its walls. Rain will make greenery grow between its stones, and we will enjoy gazing at it from afar and remembering the battles that were fought around it.
