sCenes froM viLLaGe Life aMos oz chatto &Windus, 2011, hb, 272pp, £12.99


Reviewed by Deborah brooks


There are some writers who are so skilled at their craft that you know when opening their newest work that you are in safe hands and can relax into enjoying the book. This is the literary equivalent of watching the virtuoso singer or actor at the peak of their powers. You know they will notmiss a note, fluff a line or overact.Amos Oz is of course such a writer. His book jackets now boast somany words of praise calling hima genius and comparing himto “the best Russian classical authors” that one can only imagine that such a humblemanmust feel some embarrassment when he sees the latest one arrive fromthe printers. Fortunately, the embarrassment would bemisguided and the use of the word genius is, in this instance, appropriate. Scenes fromVillage Life is Oz’s latest


book, and the third one he has published since hismasterpiece A Tale of Love and Darkness, to which all his other works will now always be compared. It is a slim volume that ismore a series of vignettes than a novel. Each one tells the story of a character who lives in the imaginary Israeli village of Tel Ilan – a place that was once agricultural but is now a haven for second home owners who power a new economy of art galleries, fashion boutiques, restaurants and a winery. So far so normal; however, each of the stories presents us with a person


anD This is The LiGhT lea Goldberg trans. barbara harshav toby Press, 2011, hb, 222pp, $24.95


the first English edition of the novel to honour the author’s 100th birthday


Reviewed byagi Erdos


Celebrated today as one of the greatest Israeli authors, Lea Goldberg (1911-1969) grew up in Russia and Lithuania, studied in Germany, and immigrated to Palestine in 1935.While Goldberg was a prolific writer of poems, plays and children’s books, she only wrote one novel.Written in 1946, the undeniably autobiographical And this is the Light is the story of a young woman, Nora Krieger, who returns from university in


our arrogance.And our hypocrisy?” By the end of the story we are not sure if he is indeed a paranoid oldman or the only one who sees the world as it really is. We alsomeet a couple whose only son


whose life looks usual on the surface – estate agent, teacher, librarian etc – yet behind each story is a sense ofmenace and disturbance that suggests that Tel Ilan is in fact a sinister place and its normality a facade. The centrepiece of the book and the


most obviousmetaphor for this underlying sense of wrongness is ‘Digging’. In the story Rachel, a widowed teacher, lives with her old and cantankerous father, Pesach Kedem, a formermember of the Knesset, and a bitter one at that. Pesach is convinced that at night there is digging going on under the house – it disturbs his sleep by night and preoccupies hismind by day. He is also given to pessimistic rants about the state of the State of Israel: “what about us, Rachel?What are we, would youmind tellingme that? No? Well, letme tell you then,my dear: we are a passing shadow, like yesterday when it is past” and talks of “our villainy, our cruelty,


Germany to her hometown in Lithuania for the summer. Her father is mentally ill through having been imprisoned and badly abused – just like Goldberg’s own father. Nora goes away on holiday with her mother, where the appearance ofAlbert Arin, an old family friend, brings excitement to the otherwise uneventful resort and turns Nora’s emotional life upside down. Nora andArin become friendly and she falls in love with the significantly older man. The book is a story of their unfolding relationship and of Nora’s struggle with the ghost of insanity constantly haunting her. Goldberg’s writing is poetic and


melancholy and flows at a gentle, even lazy, pace.All life seems to take place in words, thoughts and feelings. The novel calls to mind the Russian classics of the


19th century, their unhappy and discontented characters and the dull monotony of rural life.


► JEWiSh REnaiSSancE octobER 2011 51


killed himself, aman whose comfortable life is disturbed by the arrival of a sinister stranger, an estate agent who is apparently locked in the basement of a house he wanted to buy, a lonely aunt looking for her lost nephew, and aman whose wife seems to have disappeared. The characters appear and reappear in each other’s lives just like in real village life, and each of themseems to be seeking something elusive, just out of reach. Tel Ilan is a place of thwarted desires and unhappy people. The other story that tells us a great deal


about Tel Ilan is ‘Singing’, in which the residents of Tel Ilan gather to sing traditional songs that praise the beauty of Israel. In a slightly obviousmetaphor, we are told that there areAir Force planes flying “overhead on their way back frombombing enemy targets, but because of the singing and the music we could hardly hear theminside the room.” So, Tel Ilan sings as around themthe country is at war and the village in turmoil. Scenes from Village Life is not a


cheerful book, and not one that suggests that Amos Oz feels happy with the direction in which his country is going but wemust take care not to read all novels by Israeli writers as purely beingmetaphors about the state of the State of Israel. In fact, this stands very well on its own as a depiction of small village life that subverts the pastoral idyll and hints at the darkness beneath the surface.


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