To Know a Woman (Hebrew: Lada’at Isha) was published by Am Oved in 1989. Yoel Ravid has retired from the Mossad — Israel’s foreign intelligence service — after his wife Ivria’s sudden death. He moves to a quiet suburb with his mother, his daughter Netta, and his mother-in-law, and begins a life of domestic routine that is utterly foreign to him. Yoel spent his career analyzing intelligence: reading documents, interpreting signals, detecting lies, predicting behavior. He was very good at it. But he cannot read his own life.
The novel’s irony is structural: a man whose professional skill was understanding people discovers that he never understood the people he loved. He did not know what his wife thought or felt; he does not know what his daughter needs; he cannot interpret the signals of ordinary domestic life. The intelligence skills that served him in espionage are useless in intimacy because intimacy requires a different kind of knowledge — not the analyst’s penetrating gaze but the willingness to be seen, to be vulnerable, to accept that another person is not a problem to be decoded but a consciousness to be met.
Oz develops this theme with characteristic restraint. The novel is quiet — there are no dramatic revelations, no spy-thriller plot twists. Yoel tends his garden, drives his mother-in-law to medical appointments, has cautious conversations with his daughter, and begins a tentative relationship with a neighbor. The drama is entirely interior: a man learning, very slowly and very late, that the skills that made him powerful in the world are the skills that prevented him from living in it.
Collecting To Know a Woman
First English edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1991): Translated by Nicholas de Lange.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$15