Morality Tale
Elsewhere, Perhaps.
by Amos Oz.
Translated by Nicolas De Lange. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 309 pp. $7.95.
Amos Oz has emerged in recent years as the best known of the younger Israeli novelists and a leading spokesman for the generation of sabras who grew up along with the State of Israel. In a country where “sensational” novels, and certainly those with any pretense to seriousness, are a relative rarity, Oz's works have gained considerable popularity, even notoriety, for both the controversiality of their themes and the boldness of their presentation. This was especially true of My Michael, the novel which served to introduce Oz to American readers, and which Oz wrote when he was scarcely twenty-eight years old. A study of the personal disintegration of a young Israeli housewife, My Michael succeeded in transforming a political “fact”—the Arab-Israeli dilemma—into a genuine metaphor of the imagination. The violence of its heroine's erotic fantasies of abduction and rape by Arab twins with whom she had grown up before the War of Independence in 1948 suggested another violence even more disturbing to the Israeli psyche than the political one. Jerusalem, the setting of the novel and a still-divided city, was depicted as a dense, opaque landscape mirroring the heroine's inner conflict, an illusion of abstractions set upon a wilderness of suppressed violence, ever on the verge of upheaval by demiurgic powers.
Both in My Michael and in his later work, Oz has demonstrated a special talent for creating fiction out of the exigencies of Israel's political and historical legacy. It is a talent that is again evident, although to a considerably lesser degree, in Elsewhere, Perhaps, Oz's second novel—second, that is, to appear in English; actually, it is a reworked and truncated version of the author's first novel, published in Israel in 1966. Like My Michael, the present work also purports to offer a critical glance at an aspect of Israeli society: the most sacrosanct of Israel's social institutions, the kibbutz.
Oz's fictional settlement, Metzudat Ram, situated on the northern border, is a far cry from the typical kibbutz usually shown to foreign tourists. The founding fathers of Metzudat Ram, now deep into middle-age, have lost the idealism of their youth. Their optimistic belief in the efficacy of collective living to solve all of the problems of the human condition, a faith which sustained them through the years of hardship and deprivation, has now been reduced to a matter of habit. Although they enjoy a certain measure of material prosperity, the price for this has turned out to be an embourgeoisement of their lives. The kibbutz, in short, has turned into just another small town, an Israeli Peyton Place: one-third boredom, and two-thirds gossip.
The arch-topic of gossip in Metzudat Ram, and the one which gives this novel the better part of its plot, is a double case of adultery involving the families of Reuven Harish, kibbutz poet-schoolteacher, and Ezra Berger, kibbutz truck-driver—Harish with Berger's wife, Bronka; Berger, somewhat more improbably, with Harish's teenage daughter, Noga. But these melodramatic escapades soon fade in interest as it becomes clear that everything in the novel has been called into being only to serve a single schematic purpose. Metzudat Ram and its cast of characters are merely a scaffolding for the morality play Oz has chosen to stage.
Like all morality plays, this one deals in predictable dualities and opposites. Thus, the population of Metzudat Ram is divided between immigrant-settlers from Russia and Germany, with each group retaining its dominant national character traits—the Germans stolid, efficient, humorless; the Russians imaginative, vociferous, given to occasional abandonment. Thus, too, the physical setting of the kibbutz—a landscape of mountains and valleys, “rich in contrasts, contrasts between appearance and reality.” And thus, more concretely, the novel's two main protagonists, Reuven Harish and Ezra Berger—the former blond, thin, light-skinned; the latter, dark, heavy-limbed, earthy—whose surnames, incidentally, are simply tags borrowed from Hebrew and German for valley and mountain. And finally, locked in the grip of this novel's unrelenting dualism, there is a representation of conflict between Zion and Diaspora, played out between “new” Jews, as embodied in the settlers of Metzudat Ram, and “old” ones, personified by two “exilic” Jews from Germany, a tourist by the name of Isaac Hamburger and Siegfried Berger, Ezra's brother.
Unfortunately, Oz's determination to force an allegory out of the implausible Zion-Diaspora conflict works at cross-purposes to and eventually defeats the novel's more interesting intention: the naturalistic expose of the “other side” of kibbutz life. The members of Metzudat Ram never seem more than a bland force of personalized Goodness, while the Arabs and the Diaspora Jews are forever being straitjacketed into Oz's embodiment of the power of Evil. In a scheme as rigid and predetermined as this, little opportunity remains for specificity or nuance. There is, in fact, no essential difference between the “new” and “old” Jews in their Jewishness—neither are recognizably Jewish—except, perhaps, for the novel's “evil fairy,” Siegfried Berger, who is embellished by Oz with all the grotesque flourishes that once marked the typical anti-Semitic caricature of the Jew.
Israeli literature, if it is ever to mature, will undoubtedly have to confront the critical issue of the relation of Diaspora Jewry to Israel, and the relation of Israel to Diaspora Jewry, in all its troubled complexity. That this issue has a special poignancy for the Israeli writer, whose own identity is forged in an ongoing dialectic between the secular values of Western culture and the religious-historical values of Judaism, should go without saying. But an allegory of the kind presented in Elsewhere, Perhaps is little more than a refusal to acknowledge the existence of the problem. The novel fails precisely where the imagination might have offered insight into the nexus of Zion and Diaspora.
