Black Box (Hebrew: Kufsa Shchora) was published by Am Oved in 1987. The novel is constructed entirely from written documents: letters, telegrams, lawyers’ letters, postcards, and the occasional will or legal notice. The correspondents are Ilana Brandstetter and her former husband Alexander Gideon — an Ashkenazi intellectual and war hero now living in exile in the United States — who must deal with their sixteen-year-old son Boaz, who has dropped out of school and is heading toward delinquency.
Ilana has remarried Michel Henri Sommo, a Sephardi Jew and Orthodox religious figure — and this marriage, in Oz’s design, represents the internal fault line of Israeli society. The Ashkenazi-Sephardi division, the secular-religious divide, the tension between European intellectual culture and Middle Eastern Jewish tradition — all of these national conflicts are refracted through the personal wreckage of a failed marriage and a troubled son.
The epistolary form is not ornamental; it is essential. Each document reveals and conceals: the writers perform for their correspondents, withhold information, strategize, and manipulate. The “black box” of the title — the device that records the truth of what happened before a crash — is what the novel assembles from these partial, unreliable documents. The reader must reconstruct the truth from fragments, and the truth, when it emerges, is that none of the characters is entirely honest about their motives, their histories, or their hopes.
Collecting Black Box
First English edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1988): Translated by Nicholas de Lange.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $8–$20