Amos Oz's Emptiness - He Can't Feel Jewish

As Ethan Bronner notes in his report on Amos Oz's new novel,

...in a 1990 newspaper interview in Haaretz, [Oz] made this point about himself: “There’s always a part of me that’s uninvolved, that sits on the sidelines and observes. Sometimes it looks on from the distance, almost hostile. Very chilly.”

With that in mind, consider the photograph accompanying the story:



Oz sees Israel not as the reality of Zionist realization but he requires the emptiness of the desert (he resides in Arad), with the primal view of no one there. And that characterises his political approach - while people populate his literary output, his politics are people-lacking or, specifically, Jewish-empty.

And Bronner writes:

Although he was a native of West Jerusalem, and his parents, who had fled Europe, were right-wing nationalists, he could not rejoice because he kept asking himself how he would feel in the place of the Palestinians living there.

“I tried my hardest to feel in East Jerusalem like a man who has driven out his enemies and recovered his ancestral inheritance,” he wrote in a 1968 essay included in the new collection. “But I couldn’t.”

He just can't feel Jewish.