By Ron Charles (November 28, 2016)
Judas, a new novel by Amos Oz (1939 – 2018), is a paradox of stillness and provocation. The Israeli author, many times a contender for the Nobel Prize, has reduced the physical action of this story to a tableau of domestic grief. But beneath a scene of fermented woe, he incites a storm of theological and political arguments about the founding of Israel and the origins of Christianity.
The plot sounds almost repellently static. In the opening pages, set around 1960, Shmuel Ash, a young graduate student in Jerusalem, loses his girlfriend and his parents’ allowance. Despondent, he abandons his master’s thesis and takes a job as a companion to an elderly intellectual named Wald, who “larded his speech with quotations and allusions, witticisms and plays on words.” In exchange for room and board and a modest paycheck, Shmuel agrees to talk and argue with Wald from 5 to 11 o’clock every evening. Beyond that, he must only feed the fish, bring in a cup of tea and swear never to reveal anything he hears within these walls.
There’s a touch of mystery in this sepulchral house, but it’s the riddle of sorrow, not intrigue. Wald’s only son was killed in 1948 while serving in the Israeli army. Since then, the old man has floated on a wave of disputation, talking himself to life one day after another, spilling out a flood of ironic and learned verbiage to keep despair from closing over him entirely. His widowed daughter-in-law, Atalia, now lives with him, too, contributing her own diamond-hard sadness to this crippled little family. That Shmuel will fall in love with Atalia is obvious to all three of them; that she will break his heart is obvious to everyone but Shmuel.
Plotless novels about lost young men represent a tedious subgenre of contemporary literature, but, naturally, Oz rises above that by rendering his hapless hero so comically sympathetic. Shmuel is large, hairy and embarrassingly prone to weeping. “He was kindhearted, generous, brimming with goodwill,” Oz writes, “and as soft as a woolen glove, going out of his way to make himself useful, but at the same time he was muddled and impatient.” His ex-girlfriend complains that he’s either rushing about like “an excited puppy” or lying around like “an unaired quilt.” Wald’s grim home, with its “walls accustomed to swallowing pain,” seems like the least appropriate place for him to regain his bearings.
“Judas,” winner of Germany’s International Literature Prize, depends entirely on the complexity of Oz’s themes and the tender elegance of his style, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. Two vexing issues screw through the novel like a double helix. One involves Shmuel’s research on Jewish attitudes toward Jesus. He has some vague idea that this is somehow connected to “the fate of social reformers in modern times.” His studies lead him through ancient polemics in which Jewish scholars tried to discredit Christianity by exposing its historical and theological inconsistencies. But Shmuel is particularly drawn to the Gospel character of Judas, that foundational figure in the history of Western anti-Semitism. To his mind, the world’s most famous traitor was, in fact, the world’s first and most devoted Christian. Judas hadn’t intended to murder Jesus by handing him over for crucifixion; he’d intended to provoke Jesus into demonstrating his divinity.
Judas as misguided idealist who inadvertently triggered the salvation of mankind: That interpretation — not original to Shmuel or Oz — has a certain appeal, regardless of its theological complications. But in this novel, that characterization serves as a curious archetype for reviled idealists in modern-day Israel. Specifically, as Shmuel gets to know Atalia, he learns that she is the daughter of a notorious leader of the Jewish community who dared to argue that Israel should not establish its own country but instead work to live in stateless harmony with its Arab neighbors. He was eventually castigated by Israel’s first prime minister and branded a traitor.
Although a certain degree of familiarity with mid-20th-century political history is helpful, Oz gracefully weaves that exposition into this novel of ideas. And although the story certainly involves arguments about the Israeli-Arab conflict that Oz has made in his nonfiction work, it never reads like an allegory of the author’s political views. For one thing, Atalia is too shocked by her own loss to care about such arguments anymore. Wald, meanwhile, is too Talmudic to settle on any particular position, except his deep skepticism of “universal love.” He sees such boundless claims as the slogans of all political oppressors. “I’d rather they left us all the pain and sorrow and kept their world reform for themselves,” he tells Shmuel, “seeing that it always involves slaughter, crusades, jihad or gulag, or the wars of Gog and Demagogue.”
It’s left to Shmuel, buffeted about by his research and his deepening devotion to his two wounded housemates, to determine exactly what it means to be a traitor. And it’s left to us, drawn through this rare, intellectual novel, to wrestle with Oz’s reflections on the viability of idealism in an imperfect world.
Amos Oz: ‘I love Israel, but I don’t like it very much’
As he publishes his first novel in more than a decade, the Israeli author explains why he had to rewrite the toxic story of Judas – and his complicated relationship with his homeland
If that comes as a surprise, it’s not only because Oz is an Israeli Jew. It’s also because he’s written often – and fiercely – of the role centuries of Christian persecution played in nurturing the Jewish longing for a homeland. But whatever anger he harbours toward Christian Europe, for Jesus, Oz expresses only fond admiration. Even if, the writer adds with a smile, “he and I disagree on many things – like any two Israelis”.
Now aged 77, his spectacles attached to a cord around his neck, he is still blessed with the rugged good looks and spellbinding English that have made international literary audiences swoon since the 1970s. This autumn cinemagoers might join them, thanks to the release of Natalie Portman’s film adaptation of A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz’s bestselling memoir-cum-novel. But for now he is in London to promote his latest novel, the first for more than a decade: Judas in English, it was published in Hebrew as The Gospel According to Judas.
In neatly formed, well-honed paragraphs, he tells me of his teenage fascination with the New Testament. “I realised at the age of 16 that unless I read the gospels, I would never have access to Renaissance art, to the music of Bach or the novels of Dostoevsky. So in the evenings, when the other boys went to play basketball or chase girls – I had no chance in either – I found my comfort in Jesus.”
For most of his contemporaries, especially then, the New Testament would have felt like forbidden territory, a place nice Jewish boys feared to tread. But Oz and Jesus had a family connection. His great-uncle, the scholar Joseph Klausner, was the author of Jesus of Nazareth, published in 1921, a book that scandalised Jews and Christians alike: it reclaimed Jesus as a Jew. As Oz puts it, “Jesus was born a Jew and he died a Jew. It never occurred to him to establish a new religion. He never crossed himself: he had no reason to. He never set one foot in a church. He went to synagogue.”
But as much as the young Oz was enthralled by Jesus, the story of Judas irritated him. Not theologically. But rather “the little detective within me” was appalled by the Judas tale, which, Oz says, is a “vicious, ugly story”, arresting for being so badly written: had the gospels had a decent editor, he says, it would have been struck out.
Nothing about it adds up. Judas Iscariot is meant to be a rich man, yet he performs his great act of treachery for just 30 pieces of silver – “about £400 in today’s money”. A decent sum, but surely not enough to provide a motive. And why would Jesus’s pursuers need Judas to point him out via the unforgettable gesture of a kiss? The miracle-worker was already notorious in Roman Jerusalem, having caused such a commotion at the temple. None of it makes any sense, says Oz.
These inconsistencies nagged away at him for more than half a century. Not least because the Judas legend has had grave consequences. “This is not an innocent story. This story is responsible, more than any other story told in history, for rivers of blood, for generations of hatred and persecution and inquisition and massacres and possibly the Holocaust.”
For Judas is a double synonym: a byword for traitor, but also for Jew. “In my dictionaries, it’s difficult to distinguish the two,” Oz says, before rattling off the words for Jew and Judas in both German and Spanish: in each language, the two words sound almost the same. How could a three year old German child, hearing the word for Judas, the ultimate betrayer, separate that concept from their idea of “Jew”, asks Oz. In his view, the story of Judas is “the Chernobyl of world antisemitism”.
And yet it took the arrival of this new novel’s central character to suggest a way of wrestling with the Judas problem at long last. (Oz tends to speak this way about his characters: as if they are wholly independent actors, constantly able to surprise him, even to move him to tears, by words and deeds they choose for themselves. In line with Jewish conceptions of the Almighty, Oz may be their creator, but they have free will.)
The protagonist in question is Shmuel Ash, a cuddly, clumsy, directionless postgraduate student who answers a noticeboard advert seeking a paid live-in companion for a lonely, aged intellectual. The novel follows one Jerusalem winter, as 1959 turns into 1960, in the small house occupied by Ash, the old man and his mysterious, fortysomething, widowed daughter-in-law, Atalia. (Oz says she reminds him of the Jerusalem of his youth: “She’s not young. She’s very beautiful. She’s deeply injured. She is ferociously independent and she is very angry.”) As Oz himself says, much of the book consists of this trio drinking gallons of tea and talking, talking, talking.
Many of the familiar Oz motifs are present. A triangle, or series of intersecting triangles, each containing two men and a woman. A protagonist paralysed into inaction. A woman out of reach. A mystery, perhaps a buried scandal, related to the country’s recent past. But what will gladden those readers who may have found some of Oz’s past fiction forbidding, even as they lapped up his journalism and essays – delighting in their moral rigour and deployment of fresh, clarifying metaphor – is that this novel offers aspects of both genres. It is a novel of ideas, packed with argument and inquiry, displaying Oz’s dizzying range of skills.
For Ash’s field of inquiry is Jewish attitudes to Jesus and, especially, the maligning of Judas. He unfolds his theory of the true story of Judas – a tour de force that, alone, ensures this book will linger in the memory.
Ash presents a persuasive case that, far from being a betrayer, Judas was the truest believer in Jesus. Indeed, the tragedy was that, as Oz puts it, “He believed in Jesus more than Jesus believed in himself.” Judas put aside his initial scepticism and became convinced that the Nazarene truly was the one: the purity of his teachings, the wonder of his miracles, left no doubt in his mind.
But to convince the wider public, a few remarkable feats of magic in the Galilee would not be enough. As Oz tells me, Jesus would have to pull off something incredible “on prime time television” in Jerusalem, where everyone would witness it. If he were to be crucified and yet miraculously defy his own death, somehow climbing down from the cross in front of a watching Jerusalem public, why, then everyone would bow down to him in an instant: the kingdom of heaven would be upon us.
Jesus was anxious, fearing his own death, but Judas was adamant. He played the impresario, working overtime to nudge the authorities to crucify this wonder-worker from Galilee – not because he did not believe in him, but because he did. Judas got his way, but when he saw that Jesus was not able to escape his fate, that he could not come down from the cross, that his father had forsaken him, he was distraught. He understood his mistake and duly hanged himself. “So died... the first Christian. The last Christian. The only Christian.”
It is a remarkable reimagining of this toxic tale, one that would indeed, in Oz’s words, “neutralise the lethal radiation” of antisemitism’s Chernobyl, were it ever to become the accepted view of Judas. Instead, Judas remains the hated betrayer, routinely depicted in artists’ evocations of the Last Supper with the dark, exaggerated features of anti-Jewish caricature – a man apart from his fellow apostles who are, oddly enough, all fair skinned and blessed with Aryan good looks.
This thesis sits comfortably in the novel because both share a defining theme: treachery. The enigmatic widow, Atalia, saw her father ostracised as a traitor, shunned for opposing the establishment of the state of Israel a decade earlier. He was an idealist, with a Jesus-like faith in universal love and brotherhood. He opposed all states, with their borders and flags and armies, and hoped that Jews and Arabs might live side by side in a loose community free of such apparatus. For this, he was accused of treason.
Oz does not share the dead man’s politics – he stresses that while he may be a peacenik, he has never been a pacifist – but he knows what it’s like to be branded a traitor. He denounced the occupation of the territories Israel conquered in 1967 almost as soon as the six-day war was over, when his countrymen were still giddy with victory. A soldier in that conflict – and again in 1973 – Oz first came to prominence as one of a group of young kibbutznik writers who assembled a dissenting collection on the war just won: The Seventh Day. Long before it became a matter of international diplomatic consensus, Oz was advocating the partition of historical Palestine into two states – Israel and Palestine – alongside each other. And he was a founder member of the movement that became famous as Peace Now.
At each turn, strident voices on the nationalist right have been quick to denounce him as a betrayer of his people. He says he regards it as “a badge of honour”, offering a rollcall of visionaries who were similarly denounced for treason, starting with the prophet Jeremiah and including Abraham Lincoln, the German officers who plotted to assassinate Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev and, closer to home, Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion along with Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – all Israeli leaders excoriated at some point for their readiness to compromise on territory. (Later, on the night it emerges that Peres has suffered a major stroke, Oz will be anxiously checking his phone, awaiting word on a man he has long considered a good friend: Peres, even as prime minister and even when they strenuously disagreed with each other, was a faithful reader of Oz’s novels. The two saw each other and spoke often.) To this traitors’ hall of fame, Oz adds Thomas Mann, Boris Pasternak, Albert Camus and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for good measure. Sometimes, he says, what others lambast as treason is simply “the courage to be ahead of your time”.
In the novel, these questions of fidelity and treachery hover. For Oz, an accusation of betrayal is often the reward a person receives simply for the act of changing. If they change their mind, they are accused of betraying the cause – even if they are simply finding a new way to serve the cause better.
And yet change they must. “This is my political credo and this is my business as a novelist: the changes that occur in the hearts and minds of people.” Think of Begin or Ariel Sharon, longtime hawks who found themselves pulling out of occupied territory and uprooting Israeli settlements. Admittedly, the changes experienced by Oz’s characters tend to be of the subtler, less spectacular variety, but the essential truth is the same: Oz insists that people have a tendency to surprise us – and themselves.
So what about him? How has he changed? On the core issues, he seems remarkably consistent, despite the dramatic shifts that have shaped and reshaped his small country. I first interviewed him in 1985, when I was 18. He was younger then than I am now. I remember asking him about the biblical injunction that the people of Israel be “a light unto the nations”. At the time, he told me that the day Israel abandoned that objective would be the day he would lose interest in Israel as a project.
“I take it back,” he says now. “Israel should aspire to be a decent country. That’s good enough for me.”
And what of the two state solution, an idea for which he was something of an intellectual pioneer nearly 50 years ago? Many who believe it’s right in principle have given up on it in practice, believing the moment has passed: 50 years of occupation and settlements have made it impossible. AB Yehoshua told The Guardian earlier this year: “We have to rethink the two state solution.” It was not good enough to repeat the same old slogan for half a century.
Oz is impatient with such impatience. He believes nothing in human affairs is irrevocable. If De Gaulle could move a million settlers out of Algeria, Israel could take its settlers out of the West Bank – if it had the will to do it.
And he makes a point about time. “Different clocks are working simultaneously,” he says, meaning that there are always different time scales at work. He’s opposed the occupation for every one of its 50 years. But compared with the many centuries the people of Europe took to stop killing each other and settle their borders? The Palestinian-Israeli conflict “just began yesterday”.
Besides, he’s suspicious of those who are so insistent that the two state solution is dead. He points to the curious alliance of “the Israeli far right and the radical left in Europe, including this country [Britain]. Both are amplifying the same music, saying, ‘There’s no going back on the occupation, the only solution is to live ... in one state.’ I think this is nonsense.” He is especially impatient with the leftist vision of a single state, which he brands a kind of “kitsch”, imagining that the two peoples can forget the bloodshed and conflict of the last century and “jump into bed with each other, like in a lousy Hollywood movie”.
That’s just one of many scoldings Oz is keen to dish out to the harder edges of the continental and British left. On this visit, he told Newsnight that to argue that Israel should not exist is to cross the line from anti-Zionism into antisemitism, because no one “ever said after Hitler that Germany should cease to exist, or after Stalin that there should be no Russia”. He believes that if you want to change Israel, boycotting it is foolish because “it deepens the Israeli paranoia that the whole world is against us”, thereby strengthening the Israeli right.
And he notes what he feels is a double standard. He thinks liberals overlook violence in parts of the developing world, “saying, ‘Well those people have suffered a lot, you have to understand it is only natural they are violent.’” But, “When it comes to the Jews they often say: ‘Well, they have suffered so much. How can they be violent after such an experience?’” In our conversation, he gives short shrift to those who think the Holocaust should have turned Jews into pacifists. He recalls the words of a relative of his, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, who always reminded him that her liberators “were not peace demonstrators with placards and olive branches. They were soldiers, with helmets and sub-machine guns. A Jew of my generation cannot afford to forget it.”
None of which is to suggest he’s happy with the status quo in Israel. On the contrary, he says frankly: “I love Israel, but I don’t like it very much.” What he loves remains the same as it ever was. “I love it because of the argumentativeness, because every staircase in Israel is full of memories and stories and conflicting ideas.” But he resents, he says, “the politics, the occupation, the oppression of the Palestinian people and the deterioration in civil rights standards.” He thinks “50 years of occupation and 100 years of solitude” have taken their toll, adding that “societies immersed in conflict tend to become more racist, intolerant and unforgiving”. With the weariness of a man who has seen too much history, he reflects that “long wars stink”.
Yet he remains resistant to any quick fixes or revolutionary answers. As the old man in the new novel says, big sweeping dreams of world reform “always involve slaughter, crusades or jihad or Gulag or the wars of Gog and Demagogue”. Indeed, this aversion to all-encompassing ideological dogmas is another Oz theme. His bestselling essay, “How to Cure a Fanatic”, is now taught in Swedish schools.
“A fanatic wants to change other people for their own good,” Oz tells me. “He’s a great altruist, more interested in you than in himself. He wants to save your soul, change you, redeem you – and if you prove to be irredeemable, he will be at your throat and kill you. For your own good.” Oz worries that the current era is proving hospitable to fanatics, who exist on every side and in every culture, because “as things get more complicated, people crave the simple, one-sentence answer to everything”.
The novelist says he’s always preferred “solutions, not salvations”, confirmation that for all his teenage infatuation with Jesus, he never did become a Christian. And so he keeps rising at 4am – the legacy of all those years on the kibbutz, waking early to milk the cows – leaving the Tel Aviv apartment he calls home, and taking a walk – limping slightly, thanks to a war wound – to the beach or the park to clear his head. And when he sees a window with a light on, he still finds himself imagining what’s keeping that person up at night, what’s troubling them. And, just like that, a story begins.
A scintillating novel set in 1950s Jerusalem blends a tender coming-of-age story with a thought-provoking study of betrayal
That is the question posed by Amos Oz, Israel’s best-known novelist, perpetually mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature. Judas combines an exploration of the motivation of the renegade apostle (over which the gospels are decidedly muddled) and what he calls a story of “error, desire [and] unrequited love”, set in Oz’s native Jerusalem in the winter of 1959.
The link between the two strands is young, sensitive Shmuel Ash, a student who has dropped out of university. He takes a live-in job as companion to an elderly, incapacitated man, Gershom Wald, who unattractively needs someone with whom to argue. Sharing the gloomy house, heavy with unspoken history, is Atalia Abravanel, a sensual, mysterious woman in her 40s, who it emerges is Wald’s daughter-in-law.
Shmuel falls in love with her in what becomes a tender coming-of-age tale; Wald, meanwhile, encourages his young helper to rekindle his studies on Jewish views on Jesus. That leads him naturally enough into an exploration of the character of Judas.
The Judas that takes shape is a spy, sent by the Jewish authorities, to infiltrate the inner circle of Jesus, a preacher in distant Galilee who has attracted an enthusiastic following with his miracles and his reinterpretation of what it means to follow God. But Judas goes native, and becomes the most ardent believer in Jesus’s divinity, more so than the man himself. It is, therefore, Judas who encourages Jesus to take his message to Jerusalem, and Judas who presses the chief priest to have Jesus crucified, believing he will rise from the dead on the cross. When Jesus doesn’t, Judas recognises himself as potentially the first and the last Christian and, in despair, takes his own life by hanging himself from a tree.
This was treachery in a good cause. It is not a new idea. As early as the 14th century, Saint Vincent Ferrer, a celebrated Dominican preacher close to the papacy, was pointing out that if Jesus was truly God’s son, come to Earth to redeem humankind, then his betrayal had to be part of God’s plan. Judas was therefore doing God’s business, not the devil’s.
What gives Oz’s rereading of Judas such power, however, is how he juxtaposes it with the story that Atalia reluctantly reveals to Shmuel about her own recently dead father, Shealtiel Abravanel. He had been the only member of the Zionist executive committee to oppose David Ben-Gurion (whom he suspected of having a messianic complex) over the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Abravanel had developed close links with the local Arab population and advocated instead that Jews and Arabs should live side by side as equals in a country under international control. His colleagues rejected his views, suspected him of conspiring with their enemies, forced his resignation and labelled him a traitor. Abravanel had lived out his life as a Judas, an outcast, shut away in the gloomy house. Yet, Oz suggests without ever quite saying it, he may have been right in his thinking, one of those politicians such as Churchill or even Lincoln, whose challenging, unpopular views caused them, at times, to be labeled a traitor. Their love for their country was, however, ultimately requited, while Abravanel died a prophet without honour in his own land.
Those aware of Oz’s own standing in Israel will hear echoes of the novelist himself in Abravanel. Because he has steadfastly, since 1967, advocated a two-state settlement with the Palestinians, and has robustly criticised those Israeli governments that refuse to engage with this policy, he has been dubbed a traitor by some of his fellow Israelis.
Many-layered, thought-provoking and – in its love story – delicate as a chrysalis, this is an old-fashioned novel of ideas that is strikingly and compellingly modern.
Judas by Amos Oz
By Steven G. Kellman
(Article published on SFGate Thursday, December 15, 2016)
In the 1940s, when Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch published a trilogy drawn from the New Testament, the Jewish literary establishment, wary of Christian indoctrination, ostracized him. Amos Oz is Israel’s most celebrated and widely translated contemporary author, but his opposition to Jewish settlements on the West Bank and support for a two-state solution have led hawks to brand him a traitor to Zionism.
The main character of Oz’s latest novel, a book about Judas Iscariot and other pariahs, is named Shmuel Ash. A stocky, blundering student, Ash explicitly denies any relationship to the Yiddish novelist, but the two share a fascination with the figure of Jesus. For his master’s thesis at Hebrew University, 25-year-old Ash is researching “Jewish Views of Jesus.”
Narrating “a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved,” Oz provides a setting appropriate to a sinister folktale or a story by S.Y. Agnon. It is winter, 1959, and, barely 10 years after Israeli independence, Jerusalem is a chilly, gloomy, divided city. Ash abandons graduate school when his father’s business failure ends his financial support and his girlfriend jilts him to marry her previous boyfriend.
Craving solitude, Ash responds to an ad offering room and board in exchange for companionship to Gershom Wald, a garrulous old invalid. Wald is erudite and opinionated, and Ash’s job is to serve as his audience every evening.
Sharing the isolated household is Atalia Abravanel, an attractive and enigmatic woman in her 40s who was married to Wald’s late son. Smitten by Atalia, Ash attempts to learn all he can about her and her late father, Shealtiel Abravanel, a prominent member of the Zionist Executive Committee and the Council of the Jewish Agency before Israeli independence.
Because he advocated coexistence with the Arabs and opposed the creation of Jewish and Palestinian states, Shealtiel was scorned as an apostate and forced out of his leadership positions. “When he died,” Wald explains to Ash, “he was possibly the most lonely and most hated man in Israel.”
Surveying the body of Jewish commentary on the life and meaning of Jesus, Ash has become convinced that Jesus, born Jewish, was never a “Christian.” It was his successors who ossified Jesus’ teachings into dogma enforced by an ecclesiastical bureaucracy that became toxic to other Jews.
Ash notes that Judas, whose name became synonymous with deceit, has been portrayed as the prototypical repugnant Jew, “the incarnation of treachery, the incarnation of Judaism, the incarnation of the connection between Judaism and betrayal.” Judas became the pretext for pogroms, inquisitions and genocide.
However, in Ash’s thesis, Judas was actually the most loyal of Jesus’ disciples, the one who loved him most. As a fictional premise, it is as outrageously provocative as the plan to return all Jews to the Diaspora in Philip Roth’s “Operation Shylock.” Judas, claims Ash, arranged for the crucifixion as a demonstration of Jesus’ divinity; Jesus would climb down from the cross unscathed, a manifestation to all the world that he was not just another preacher.
In the manuscript he is calling “The Gospel According to Judas” (the original Hebrew title of Oz’s novel), Ash writes: “Judas Iscariot was therefore the author, the impresario, the stage manager, and the director of the spectacle of the crucifixion.” It was not remorse over treachery that led Judas to hang himself, but rather profound disillusionment, recognition that God had indeed forsaken Jesus.
Oz plants numerous parallels between Judas and Shealtiel Abravanel, despised by Zionists as a dangerous turncoat. He is the antithesis of David Ben-Gurion, the successful leader of Israel’s struggle for independence and its first prime minister. After the triumph of the Jewish state, Shealtiel, an Arabophile who saw only disaster in a future that divided Arabs and Jews, ended his days in suicidal solitude.
Oz does not canonize Shealtiel, his prickly fictional creation. “Judas” is a novel, not a polemic, and he presents Wald, a patriot who lived with Shealtiel in bitter silence, as a powerful antagonist. “I consider Ben-Gurion the greatest Jewish leader of all time,” he declares. “Maybe one of the greatest statesmen in history.”
Ably translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange, the British theologian who also translated Oz’s “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” “Judas” is a fascinating coming-of-age story in which young Shmuel learns that society turns its black sheep into scapegoats.
- Read THE AMOS OZ AND CAT INTERVIEW
- See also the Amos Oz obituaries on my post:
ANOTHER GREAT ONE'S GONE...
