A Tale of Love and Darkness (Hebrew: Sipur al Ahava ve-Choshech) was published by Keter in 2002 and is widely considered Oz’s masterpiece — the book that synthesizes his fiction’s themes with the autobiographical material that underlies them. The memoir covers Oz’s childhood in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, with digressions into his parents’ and grandparents’ lives in Eastern Europe.
Oz’s parents — Yehuda Arieh Klausner, a librarian and failed scholar, and Fania Mussman, an intellectual and storyteller from a cultivated Ukrainian family — represent two strands of Jewish culture destroyed by the twentieth century. The Eastern European world of Oz’s grandparents — its languages, its libraries, its arguments, its aspirations — was annihilated by the Holocaust. The Jerusalem of Oz’s childhood — a small, provincial, intensely bookish city of refugees and idealists — was transformed by the 1948 war into the capital of a state whose military realities would overwhelm the literary culture that preceded it.
The book’s emotional center is Oz’s mother, Fania, who suffered from severe depression and killed herself when Oz was twelve. He writes about her suicide with a controlled tenderness that is the more devastating for its restraint: he does not explain her death or assign blame but describes the world she inhabited — its disappointments, its narrow rooms, its isolation — with an attention that amounts to an act of posthumous understanding.
Oz’s prose (translated by Nicholas de Lange in the English edition) moves between registers with extraordinary fluency: comic scenes of neighborhood life, precise descriptions of Jerusalem’s architecture and light, meditations on language and nationalism, and passages of grief that achieve their power by understatement.
Collecting A Tale of Love and Darkness
First Hebrew edition (Keter, Jerusalem, 2002): Hardcover.
First English edition (Harcourt, New York, 2004): Translated by Nicholas de Lange.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25
- Signed: $75–$200