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Summary
Summary
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
Winner of the International Literature Prize, the new novel by Amos Oz is his first full-length work since the best-selling A Tale of Love and Darkness.
Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abarbanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her forties, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets.
At once an exquisite love story and coming-of-age novel, an allegory for the state of Israel and for the biblical tale from which it draws its title, Judas is Amos Oz's most powerful novel in decades.
Author Notes
Amos Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem on May 4, 1939. As a young teenager, he moved to Kibbutz Hulda, where he completed his secondary education and worked on a farm. After he completed mandatory military service in 1961, the kibbutz assembly sent him to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a B.A. in philosophy and literature. After graduation, he moved back to Hulda, where he wrote, did farm work, did guard and dining-room duty, and taught in the kibbutz high school. He fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars and spent a year as a visiting fellow at Oxford University.
He wrote novels, collections of short fiction, works of nonfiction, and essays. His novels included My Michael, Black Box, and The Gospel According to Judas. His memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, was adapted into a movie in 2016. His last book, Dear Zealot, was made up of three essays on the theme of fanaticism. He was an advocate for peace and believed in a two-state solution, meaning the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In the late 1970s, he helped found Peace Now. He received several awards including the Goethe Prize, the French Knight's Cross of the Légion D'Honneur, and the Israel Prize. He died after a short battle with cancer on December 28, 2018 at the age of 79.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Oz raises fundamental questions concerning Israeli politics, religion, ethics, and history in this novel about a young Jewish scholar adrift in 1959 Jerusalem. Graduate student Shmuel Ash decides to abandon his studies and perhaps leave Jerusalem; when his parents can no longer support him, his girlfriend marries her ex-boyfriend, and even his Socialist discussion group breaks up. Answering an advertisement for a live-in companion in an old Jerusalem neighborhood, Shmuel finds a welcome retreat in the home of Gershom Wald, a 70-year-old retired schoolteacher suffering from an unnamed degenerative disease. Gershom's primary caregiver is his son's widow, Atalia, and Shmuel's job consists mainly in providing Gershom with spirited debate. The old man's favorite topic-the formation of the state of Israel-proves somewhat sensitive in that Atalia's father, David Ben-Gurion opponent Shealtiel Abravanel, had opposed the idea of establishing a Jewish state without first addressing Arab concerns adequately, a position for which he was deemed a traitor. Gershom and Shmuel also discuss the famous traitor that Shmuel has been studying, Judas Iscariot. As Shmuel researches Abravanel and Judas, Oz (A Tale of Love and Darkness) suggests each might be less a traitor than an idealist with an alternate point of view. Oz's appreciation for multiple perspectives underlies powerful descriptions of Judas at the crucifixion, the brutal murder of Atalia's husband's during Israel's War of Independence, and Shmuel with Atalia at King David's tomb. Through the story of one young man at a crossroads, Oz presents thought-provoking ideas about traitors, a moving lament for the cost of Israeli-Arab conflict, and a heartfelt call for compassion. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The latest novel by prominent Israeli writer Oz (Scenes from Village Life, 2011) folds a meditation on loyalty and loss into a tender coming-of-age story, and the result is touching and intellectually potent. It is 1959, and Shmuel is an idealistic bundle of aspirations and anxieties. When his university studies stall, and his girlfriend dumps him, he accepts a job as a caretaker for Gershom Wald, a mournful and argumentative old man, and quickly falls in love with Atalia, the beautiful older woman who shares Wald's musty, book-lined house on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Atalia, the daughter of a political figure branded a traitor for advocating compromise with the Arabs, is taciturn and aloof; her husband, Wald's son, perished horribly in the 1948 war. Tormented by love for Atalia and weighed upon by the profound loss that permeates their house, Shmuel finds solace in exegesis, developing a theory that Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus, was actually his most enthusiastic apostle and, perhaps, the first true Christian. In pivoting between biblical times and the divided Jerusalem of 1959, Oz's allegorical intentions become as unambiguous as his political affinities, and the tentative romance between Shmuel and Atalia provides light moments and the possibility of new beginnings. Oz is as engaging and provocative as ever.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN A 2005 INTERVIEW, George Saunders remarked that "all moral concerns in fiction reduce to technical concerns." He argued for specificity over vagueness - for its ability to make us feel compassion, and for thoughtful fiction's ability to frame a complex political argument through aesthetic means. The Israeli author Amos Oz has been publishing fiction and nonfiction since the 1960s. Outspoken about politics, he has always supported a two-state solution in the Middle East, regardless of any given Israeli government's policies. American readers may be most familiar with his 2004 memoir, "A Tale of Love and Darkness," which tells Oz's coming-of-age story against the backdrop of his mother's suicide and the state of Israel's founding. (Natalie Portman's movie version was released this summer.) Oz's new novel, "Judas," rendered in sumptuous English by his longtime translator, Nicholas de Lange, similarly exemplifies Saunders's notion of a relationship between the moral and the aesthetic. "Judas" concerns Shmuel Ash, a student in Jerusalem who leaves his studies in the winter of 1959-60 "because his relationship had broken down, because his research had stalled and especially because his father's finances had collapsed." Oz describes Shmuel's character and physiognomy in loving, if not always flattering, detail - descriptions that weave with subtle variation through the novel. He walks with his "bushy, bearded head thrust forward, his body leaning with it, as if eager for the fray. His legs always seemed to be chasing after his body, which in turn was pursuing his head, as if they were afraid of being left behind when he disappeared around the next corner." Despite Shmuel's frantic momentum, the narrative slows when he answers an ad seeking a companion for an elderly invalid near Jerusalem's western edge. Shmuel finds himself captivated by the peaceful old house and its inhabitants. Aged Gershom Wald is "an ugly man, broad, crooked and hunchbacked," who spends his days pontificating to old friends on the phone. When Shmuel first arrives, the old man greets him with a shout: "Wald! Wald! My name is Wald!" Shmuel is immediately attracted to the house's other inhabitant, Atalia Abravanel, who has a notable pedigree: Her father, Shealtiel Abravanel, was an early and prominent opponent of Israel's statehood . The house's slowness gives Oz leisure to let sentences unfold. Characters and their ideas occupy the narrative foreground, while in the background a "charcoal-black cat, no doubt a tom, sometimes crossed the yard, slowly, imperiously, his tail erect, padding and gliding on velvety feet, as if each of his delicate paws did not step on the ground but languorously licked the polished paving stones that shone and glittered in the rain." The book's prose is meticulous, almost pre-modern. This and the plot's stillness - days pile up, but many of the novel's "events" are Shmuel's realizations - make reading "Judas" feel a bit like reading Thomas Bernhard without the misanthropy. Instead of building an escalating triangle of plot, "Judas" lets the reader gradually understand things, most important the past that binds Wald and Atalia. For much of the book, their relationship is a mystery; when Shmuel mistakenly assumes Atalia is Wald's wife, Wald responds: "Atalia is, in fact, my mistress. . . . I am not using the word in the vulgar sense, of course, but rather as in the famous saying of the first Queen Elizabeth of England: 'I will have here but one mistress and no master.' " The thread that ties them together is dark and disturbing - I lost sleep over its imagery - and woven into the fabric of Israel's bloody history. Learning Wald and Atalia's story leads Shmuel to investigate Atalia's father's role in founding the state. Alone among the founders, and influenced by "the Arab revolt in 1936, Hitler, the underground movements, the killings, the retaliation operations of the Jewish underground, the hangings by the British and especially his conversations with his Arab friends," Shealtiel came to believe "there was in fact room for the two communities and that it would be better for them to exist side by side, or one within the other, without the framework of a state." By the standards of the novel's time and ours, this is a radical view. Shealtiel Abravanel's commitment to this idea means being expelled from the Zionist Executive Committee. "People abused and reviled him," Wald says; "they called him a traitor." This connection, made late in the book, sheds light on a thread that has run more or less without explanation through the novel: Shmuel's abandoned thesis on Jewish views of Jesus and Christian ideas about Judas. At one point he notes: "Jesus and all his apostles were Jews and the children of Jews. But in the Christian imagination the only one remembered as a Jew . . . was Judas Iscariot." Shmuel imagining Judas's sorrow after the crucifixion fills a 13page chapter that slides from third-person narration into a first-person confession in Judas's voice. Jesus on the cross "wept, shouted and screamed with pain, calling over and over again for his mother, calling for her repeatedly in a shrill, piercing voice, like the crying of a fatally wounded infant abandoned in a field alone, parched with thirst as the last of its blood seeped out under the beating sun." THROUGHOUT "JUDAS," SHMUEL'S thoughts on Jesus and Judas appear not as quotations but as exposition. Yet when Wald holds forth, his ideas are expressed and punctuated as dialogue - long tracts of it, happily indifferent to the conventional view that letting characters speechify makes them sound like talking heads. Wald's monologues are enchanting, part of what makes "Judas" a successful novel of ideas. Oz doesn't overdo it, though. By folding Shmuel's thoughts into the text's narrative fabric, he allows them to double as the character's ideas and the novel's own. Shmuel and Oz both vividly understand the role of the traitor, an epithet Oz himself has at times been called by political opponents. How this ties in to Shealtiel Abravanel's story - and to Shmuel's own - is a mystery I will leave you to solve as you read this magnificent novel. On the surface, George Saunders and Amos Oz may seem different kinds of writers: one funny, one serious; one whose narrators grasp at meaning, the other master of an old-school, highbrow eloquence. Yet they share a sensibility. In that same interview, Saunders says: "I've known people who started out wanting to fix the world, and when they find out the world can't be fixed . . . they retreat to a sort of cynical stance. When you think about it, that's all ego: The world refused to be fixed by me, the center of the universe; therefore I hate the world." Amos Oz knows he can do his small part to fix the world through examining its complexities. The ending of "Judas" feels as nuanced as life itself. How could it not? The novel grapples with the humanity of Jesus; the basis of anti-Semitism in particular and prejudice in general; the hope for eventual peace in the state of Israel; love. Oz pitches the book's heartbreak and humanism perfectly from first page to last, as befits a writer who understands how vital a political role a novelist can play. The hero answers an ad seeking a companion for an invalid, and is captivated. EMILY BARTON is the author, most recently, of "The Book of Esther," a novel.
Kirkus Review
Pensive, sometimes even brooding novel by Oz (Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, 2011, etc.), widely considered Israels greatest living writer. If there had been no Judas, there would have been no crucifixion, and no Christianity. Should Christiansand Jesus, for that matterbe grateful to Judas, then? The question and a host of related queries resound through the halls of Gershom Walds Jerusalem apartment, its floors groaning under the burden of books and memories. Shmuel Ash is a bit more than a shlimazel, but hes had a run of bad luck all the same: his parents business has failed, meaning that his allowance has disappeared, and meanwhile his girlfriend has gone off and married someone else. Apart from burying himself in a thesis on Jewish views of Jesus, what else can he do? Well, for one thing, he can fall in love with the sizzling widow who also lives in Walds place, where Shmuel has been taken on as a kind of live-in intellectual foil. Why Atalia lives there requires some ferreting out, and suffice it to say that her presence involves echoes of betrayal, perceived or real: They called him a traitor, says Wald of still another shadowy presence in that darkened, bookish house, because he fraternized with Arabs. [221] Oz does not overwork what could be an oppressive and too-obvious theme, and he is the equal of Kundera in depicting the kind of love that is accompanied more by sighs of impatience and reproval than of desire satisfied. One thing is for sure: Just as Judas is foreordained to betray Jesus, Shmuel is destined to fall for Atalia; even the cynical, world-weary Wald allows that he should surrender to her: You no longer have any choice. [231] Naturally, the ending isnt quite happywe would not be in the land of Oz otherwisebut it is perfectly consonant with the story leading to it. Lovely, though with a doleful view of the possibilities of peace, love, and understanding, whether among nations or within households. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Oz is an iconic cultural figure and one of the most celebrated writers in Israel; his work has been published in more than 40 languages. Short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, this novel follows a young man who falls in love with a troubled woman and uncovers her family's tragic and traitorous role in the founding of Israel. (LJ 10/15/16) © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved. Some of the buildings still bore the marks of the war that had divided the city a decade earlier. In the background you could hear the distant strains of an accordion, or the plaintive sound of a harmonica from behind closed shutters. In many flats in Jerusalem you might find van Gogh's starry whirlpool skies or his shimmering cypresses on the living room wall, rush mats on the floors of the small rooms, and Doctor Zhivago or Yizhar's Days of Ziklag lying open, face-down, on a foam sofa bed that was covered with a length of Middle Eastern cloth and piled with embroidered cushions. A paraffin heater burned all evening long with a blue flame. In a corner of the room a tasteful bunch of thorn twigs sprouted from a mortar shell casing. At the beginning of December, Shmuel Ash abandoned his studies at the university and decided to leave Jerusalem, because his relationship had broken down, because his research had stalled, and especially because his father's finances had collapsed and Shmuel had to look for work. Shmuel was a stocky, bearded young man of around twenty-five, shy, emotional, socialist, asthmatic, liable to veer from wild enthusiasm to disappointment and back again. His shoulders were broad, his neck was short and thick, and his fingers, too, were thick and short, as if they each lacked a knuckle. From every pore of Shmuel Ash's face and neck curled wiry hairs like steel wool: this beard continued upward till it merged with the tousled hair of his head and downward to the curling thicket of his chest. From a distance he always seemed, summer and winter alike, to be agitated and pouring with sweat. But close up, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that instead of a sour smell of sweat, his skin somehow exuded a delicate odor of talcum powder. He would be instantly intoxicated by new ideas, provided they were wittily dressed up and involved some paradox. But he also tended to tire quickly, possibly on account of an enlarged heart and his asthma. His eyes filled easily with tears, which caused him embarrassment and even shame. A kitten mewling by a wall on a winter's night, having lost its mother perhaps, and darting heartrending glances at Shmuel while rubbing itself against his leg, would make his eyes well up. Or if, at the end of some mediocre film about loneliness and despair at the Edison Theater, it turned out that the bad guy had a heart of gold, he could be choked with tears. And if he spotted a thin woman with a child, total strangers, coming out of Shaare Zedek Hospital, hugging each other and sobbing, he would start weeping too. In those days, it was usual to see crying as something that women did. A weeping male aroused revulsion, and even faint disgust, rather like a woman with a beard. Shmuel was ashamed of this weakness of his and made an effort to control it, but in vain. Deep down he shared the ridicule that his sensitivity aroused, and was reconciled to the thought that there was some flaw in his virility, and that therefore it was likely that his life would be sterile and that he would achieve nothing much. But what do you do, he sometimes asked himself with disgust, beyond feeling pity? For instance, you could have picked that kitten up, sheltered it inside your coat, and brought it back to your room. Who would have stopped you? And as for the sobbing woman with the child, you could simply have gone up to them and asked if there was anything you could do to help. You could have sat the child down on the balcony with a book and some biscuits while you and the woman sat side by side on your bed discussing what had happened to her and what you might try to do for her. A few days before she left him, Yardena said: "Either you're like an excited puppy, rushing around noisily -- even when you're sitting on a chair you're somehow chasing your own tail -- or else you're the opposite, lying on your bed for days on end like an unaired quilt." She was alluding, on the one hand, to his perpetual tiredness and, on the other, to a certain choppy quality in his gait, as if he were always about to break into a run. He would leap up steps two at a time. He rushed across busy roads at an angle, risking his life, not looking right or left, hurling himself into the heart of a skirmish, his bushy, bearded head thrust forward, his body leaning with it, as if eager for the fray. His legs always seemed to be chasing after his body, which in turn was pursuing his head, as if they were afraid of being left behind when he disappeared around the next corner. He ran all day long, frantically, out of breath, not because he was afraid of being late for a class or a political meeting but because at every moment, morning or evening, he was struggling to do everything he had to do, to cross off all the items on his daily list, and to return at last to the peace and quiet of his room. Each day of his life seemed to him like a laborious circular obstacle course, from the time he was wrenched from sleep in the morning until he was back under his quilt again. He loved to lecture anyone who would listen, particularly his comrades from the Socialist Renewal Group: he loved to clarify, to state the facts, to contradict, to refute, and to reinvent. He spoke at length, with enjoyment, wit, and brio. But when the reply came, when it was his turn to listen to others' ideas, Shmuel was suddenly impatient, distracted, tired, until his eyes closed and his tousled head sank down onto his shaggy chest. He enjoyed haranguing Yardena too, sweeping away received ideas, drawing conclusions from assumptions and vice versa. But when she spoke to him, his eyelids drooped after a minute or two. She accused him of not listening to a word she was saying, he denied it, she asked him to repeat what she had just said, and he changed the subject and told her about some blunder committed by Ben-Gurion. He was kindhearted, generous, brimming with goodwill, 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. He never knew where he had put his other sock, what exactly his landlord wanted from him, or whom he had lent his lectures notes to. On the other hand, he was never muddled when he stood up to quote with devastating accuracy what Kropotkin had said about Nechayev after their first meeting, and what he had said two years later. Or which of Jesus' apostles was less talkative than the rest. Though Yardena liked his bouncy spirit, his helplessness, and the exuberance that made her think of a friendly, high-spirited dog, always nuzzling you, demanding to be petted, and drooling in your lap, she had decided to leave him and accept a proposal of marriage from her previous boyfriend, a hard-working, taciturn hydrologist by the name of Nesher Sharshevsky, a specialist in rainwater collection, who nearly always managed to anticipate whatever she might want next. He had bought her a pretty scarf for her secular birthday, and two days later, on her religious birthday, he had given her a small green oriental rug. He even remembered her parents' birthdays. Excerpted from Judas by Amos Oz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.