Amos Oz - Biography

Biography

Oz was born in Jerusalem, where he grew up at No. 18 Amos Street in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood. Roughly half of his fiction is set within a mile of his boyhood home.

His parents, Yehuda Arieh Klausner and Fania Mussman, were Zionist immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father studied history and literature in Wilno, Lithuania, and after immigrating, worked as a librarian and writer. His maternal grandfather had owned a mill in Rovno, Poland, but moved with the family to Haifa in 1934. Many of Klausner's family members were right-wing Revisionist Zionists. His great uncle Joseph Klausner was the Herut party candidate for the presidency against Chaim Weizmann and was chair of the Hebrew literary society at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He and his family were distant from religion, disdaining what they perceived to be its irrationality. Yet he attended the community religious school Tachkemoni as the alternative was the socialist school affiliated with the labor movement, to which his family was decidedly opposed in their political values. The noted poet Zelda was one of his teachers. After Tachkemoni he attended Gymnasia Rehavia.

His mother, who had suffered from depression, committed suicide when he was 12, repercussions of which he would explore in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. Soon after, at the age of 15, he became a Labor Zionist, left home, and joined kibbutz Hulda.

There he was adopted by the Huldai family (whose firstborn son Ron now serves as mayor of Tel Aviv) and lived a full kibbutz life. He also changed his surname to "Oz", Hebrew for "strength". Asked why he did not leave Jerusalem for Tel Aviv, he later said, "Tel Aviv was not radical enough – only the kibbutz was radical enough". However by his own account he was "a disaster as a laborer... the joke of the kibbutz". When Oz first began to write, the kibbutz gave him one day a week to write; when his book My Michael became a best-seller, and he had become "a branch of the farm", three days; and in the eighties he had four days for writing, while teaching for two days and taking turns as a waiter in the kibbutz dining hall on Saturdays.”

Like most Israeli Jews, he served in the Israel Defense Forces. In the late 1950s he served in the kibbutz-oriented Nahal unit and was involved in border skirmishes with Syria; during the Six-Day War (1967) he was with a tank unit in Sinai; during the Yom Kippur War (1973) he served in the Golan Heights. After Nahal, Oz studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he was sent by the General Assembly of the kibbutz. After graduating in 1963, he worked as a teacher of literature and philosophy.

His earliest publications were a few short articles in the kibbutz newsletter and the newspaper Davar. His first book Where the Jackals Howl, a collection of short stories, was published in 1965. His first novel Elsewhere, Perhaps was published in 1966. Following this, he began to write prolifically, publishing an average of one book per year on the Labor Party press, Am Oved. He ultimately left Am Oved, despite his political affiliation, and went to Keter Publishing House and signed an exclusive contract that granted him a fixed monthly salary regardless of frequency of publication. Oz married Nily Oz-Zuckerman in 1960. The couple has three children. They remained in kibbutz Hulda until they moved to Arad in the Negev desert in 1986, due to their son Daniel's asthma. Their oldest daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, teaches history at the University of Haifa.

Oz has written 18 books in Hebrew, and about 450 articles and essays. His works have been translated into some 40 languages, including Arabic. In 2008 he was Nr. 72 on the Foreign Policy/Prospect list of 100 top public intellectuals.