Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz, translated by icholas de Lange (Chatto and Windus)
A nephew fails to arrive on a bus; a wife goes missing but sends a message; strange digging sounds wake an old man every night — these disquieting happenings and others like them help to make the strangeness of this collection of stories.
They are all set in the Israeli village of Tel Ilan, with many of the villagers appearing in more than one story. They flow with deceptive simplicity, rich with natural detail and at the pace of village life.
No sooner has one read them than one feels like reading them again to get a better sense of what is at the heart of this portrait of a community.
It’s a small village, with jackals in the wadis on the outskirts, the postmistress is also the librarian, and everyone knows, or thinks he knows, what other villagers are doing.
For example, a widowed teacher lives with her old father right at the edge of the village. When they allow a young Arab student, taking a year off to write a book, to live in one of the disused farm sheds, there’s much speculation, even spying.
He exchanges his labour for accommodation and in the evenings, while father and daughter sit on the back veranda and work, he sits nearby on the steps of his room writing or playing the harmonica.
A place in wider society
It’s a tranquil domestic set-up, in spite of the paranoid, hostile wrangling of the father, who is still chasing political ghosts long after he has retired from active politics. He is further unsettled by sounds of digging deep in the night, which he blames on Adel, the student, until he realises that both of them can hear the foundations being undermined and that they have much in common.
This is the longest story in the book, 60 pages, and reflects a coming-to-terms in the wider society.
In another really bizarre and dreamlike story an estate agent who has long been eyeing one of the earliest pioneer houses in the village (which he plans to demolish for resale and development) is finally called for a discussion with the elderly mother and grandmother who own it. But it is the granddaughter who gracefully lures him into an extended tour of every room, soaking him in the history of the family, and then leaves him dozing in a wheelchair in a cellar. This mysterious story begins to take on layers of meaning when you know that Oz recently said that the conflict in Israel is not about religion or politics, but about “real estate”.
Oz’s high profile in Israeli public life — he has been a vocal activist since 1967, when he began to advocate sharing and negotiating with the Palestinians — has led to much controversy. He supports the two-state solution and acknowledges much terrible harm has been done to the Palestinians.
A detailed article and interview done by David Remnick in the New Yorker in 2004 sets out the subtleties of his position. Needless to say, these matters are not resolved for the reader of the Tel Ilan stories.
Oz seems more concerned to convey the deeper realities of consciousness through story and dream images, some of which are surreal and horrifying.
A sense of darkness
The title of his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, would do well for these stories too. Love of the village, the country, the people, permeates these stories and so too does a sense of darkness.
Though Oz has acknowledged time and again the equal claims of the Palestinians, he believes the horror of the Holocaust and the pogroms before that are not sufficiently acknowledged in the tumult of politics. This minefield of incessant irresolvable argument has been transmuted into an exceptionally beautiful book, with darkness at its heart.