Whatever careless or malicious generalisations may tempt people to see Israel as some kind of ideological monolith, the reality is that it still harbours a more ferocious internal argument about its nature and vocation as a state than perhaps any other country in the world. Amos Oz has long been a vocal participant in that argument, and his latest novel (translated with elegance and clarity by Nicholas de Lange) approaches it afresh by an unexpected route.
The central figure, the appealingly clumsy and innocent Shmuel, is a left-wing radical in Jerusalem in 1959-60 who finds lodging and a kind of employment in the household of Gershom Wald, an ageing intellectual who pays him for a fixed number of hours of conversation each day. Wald’s widowed daughter-in-law, Atalia, acts as his housekeeper alongside her work as a private investigator; for Shmuel, she is a tantalising, enigmatic and erotic presence throughout the narrative. Shmuel learns that Atalia’s father (once Wald’s closest friend) was the notorious Shealtiel Abravanel (the family name is that of one of the most celebrated Sephardic dynasties), a fictional politician who was initially close to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, but was then expelled from the Zionist executive committee because he opposed the formation of the Jewish state. He learns, too, that Atalia’s husband was brutally mutilated and killed by Arab militants.
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