RIP Amos Oz

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Cacophonix
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RIP Amos Oz

#1 Post by Cacophonix » Fri Dec 28, 2018 8:11 pm

To critics at home, Oz was a bleeding-heart liberal – but to audiences around the world he was a literary giant, steadfast in his belief for a two-state solution
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/ ... -lost-hope

Sad to hear that the author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and How to Cure a Fanatic has died. He was an extraordinary author and clearly a good man.
On my parents’ scale of values, the more western something was the more cultured it was considered. For all that Tolstoy and Dostoevski were dear to their Russian souls, I suspect that Germany – despite Hitler – seemed to them more cultured than Russia or Poland, and France more so than Germany. England stood even higher on their scale than France. As for America, there they were not so sure: after all, it was a country where people shot at Indians, held up mail trains, chased gold and hunted girls. Europe for them was a forbidden promised land, a yearned-for landscape of belfries and squares paved with ancient flagstones, of trams and bridges and church spires, remote villages, spa towns, forests and snow-covered meadows. Words like ‘cottage’, ‘meadow’ or ‘goose-girl’ excited and seduced me all through my childhood. They had a sensual aroma of a genuine, cosy world, far from the dusty tin roofs, the urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, the parched hillsides of our Jerusalem, suffocating under the weight of white-hot summer. It was enough for me to whisper to myself ‘meadow’, and at once I could hear the lowing of cows with little bells tied round their necks, and the burbling of brooks. Closing my eyes I could see the barefoot goose-girl, whose sexiness brought me to tears before I knew about anything.
From A Tale of Love and Darkness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Oz



Caco

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