Don’t Call It Night (Hebrew: Al Tagidi Layla) was published by Keter in 1994. The novel alternates between the voices of Theo and Noa, a couple living in Tel Kedar — a small, isolated development town in the Negev desert. Theo is a retired civil engineer, twenty years older than Noa; Noa is a high school teacher with an intense inner life and a restless dissatisfaction that she cannot fully articulate.
The town’s community has launched a campaign to build a drug rehabilitation center in memory of a local boy who died of an overdose. Noa throws herself into the campaign; Theo watches with skeptical distance. The center becomes the novel’s structural device: a project that is simultaneously a genuine act of communal commitment and a displacement activity — something to care about when the things you actually need to care about (your marriage, your loneliness, your unfulfilled desires) are too frightening to confront.
Oz’s alternating narration reveals the gap between what Theo and Noa tell each other and what they think. They are not unhappy in a dramatic way; they do not fight, betray each other, or make scenes. They are unhappy in the way that couples who have been together for years are sometimes unhappy: through accumulated misunderstandings, through the gradual acceptance of distance, through the discovery that intimacy does not guarantee knowledge. The desert setting — arid, beautiful, unforgiving — mirrors their emotional landscape.
Collecting Don’t Call It Night
First English edition (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1996): Translated by Nicholas de Lange.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good: $8–$15