Most Popular Books by Amos

Fima muses about the human condition in the squalid confines of his bachelor flat, he is a man who dreams noble dreams but cannot master reality.

From “a great and true voice of our time” (Washington Post Book World), comes this story of Proffy, a twelve-year-old living in Palestine in 1947. When Proffy befriends a member of the occupying British forces who shares his love of language and the Bible, he is accused of treason by his friends and learns the true nature of loyalty and betrayal. Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

A young boy in modern-day Jerusalem trades away one possession after another, only to find something much more wonderful--his first love.

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Set in 1950s Jerusalem, My Michael tells the story of a remote and intense woman named Hannah Gonen and her marriage to a decent but unremarkable man named Michael. As the years pass and Hannah''s tempestuous fantasy life encroaches upon reality, she feels increasingly estranged from him and the marriage gradually disintegrates. This novel is at once a haunting love story and a reflective portrait of place.

"A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book" Translation of La-da''at ishah.

Oz has crafted an intricate tale of people constantly seeking escape from a hostile world, an escape symbolized on its highest level by the watchmaker Pomeranz, a mathematician and musician. By the power of his music, he causes the arid earth to turn into a moist womb that receives him and his wife not in death but in immortality. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

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In The Silence of Heaven, the world renowned Israeli novelist Amos Oz introduces us to an extraordinary masterpiece of Hebrew literature that is just now appearing in English, S. Y. Agnon''s Only Yesterday. For Oz, Agnon is a treasure trove of a world no longer available to today''s writers, yet deeply meaningful for his wonderment about God, the submerged eroticism of his writing, and his juggling of multiple texts from the historical Hebrew religious library. This collection of Oz''s reflections on Agnon, which includes an essay on the essence of his ideology and poetics, is a rich interpretive work that shows how one great writer views another. Oz admires Agnon especially for his ability to invoke and visualize the religious world of the simple folk in Eastern European Jewry, looking back from the territorial context of the Zionist revival in Palestine. The tragedy of Agnon''s visions, Oz maintains, lies in his perspicacity. Long before the Holocaust, Agnon saw the degeneration, ruin, and end of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. He knew, too, that the Zionist project was far from being a secure conquest and its champions far from being happy idealists. Oz explores these viewpoints in a series of thick readings that consider the tensions between faith and the shock of doubt, yearnings and revulsion, love and hate, and intimacy and disgust. Although Oz himself is interested in particular ideological questions, he has the subtle sensibility of a master of fiction and can detect every technical device in Agnon''s arsenal. With the verve of an excited reader, Oz dissects Agnon''s texts and subtexts in a passionate argument about the major themes of Hebrew literature. This book also tells much about Oz. It represents the other side of Oz''s book of reportage, In the Land of Israel, this time exploring the ideologies of Jewish identity not on the land but in texts of the modern classical heritage. The Silence of Heaven hence takes us on a remarkable journey into the minds of two major literary figures.

Some great writers write and rewrite the first sentence of a book a hundred times and never get beyond it. Others, presumably, give up altogether and, perhaps in despair, decide to begin just as it comes to them.

Unto Death contains two beautiful short novels linked by death and destruction. Crusade is set in 1096 - a year of sinister omens. Count Guillaume of Touron sets out on a crusade to Jerusalem and on the way he serves his God by killing any Jews he meets. But will the Count find the peace of mind he seeks when he faces the terrible realities of war in the Holy Land? In Late Love Oz portrays an elderly professor living alone in Tel Aviv, a man neither loving nor loved. His last mission is to expose the plight of his fellow Russian Jews and alert the people of Israel to the conspiracy that threatens them. But nobody wants to listen...

Die Hauptfigur dieses Briefromans, der international renommierte Gelehrte Alexander Gideon, hat mit einer vergleichenden Studie zum Thema Faschismus von sich reden gemacht und verkörpert als problematischer Charakter eben den Typus, den er selber kritisch durchleuchtet. Ein leidvolles Porträt der israelischen Wirklichkeit, wäre da nicht Boas. Der Junge entwickelt sich zum hoffnungsvollen Neuling in dieser Welt, während seine Eltern noch die Black Box, den Flugschreiber ihrer abgestürzten Träume, entziffern.

A provocative new story collection from the internationally celebrated author of A Tale of Love and Darkness

A snapshot of Israel and the West Bank in the 1980s, through the voices of its inhabitants, from the National Jewish Book Award–winning author of Judas. Notebook in hand, renowned author and onetime kibbutznik Amos Oz traveled throughout his homeland to talk with people—workers, soldiers, religious zealots, aging pioneers, desperate Arabs, visionaries—asking them questions about Israel''s past, present, and future. Observant or secular, rich or poor, native-born or new immigrant, they shared their points of view, memories, hopes, and fears, and Oz recorded them. What emerges is a distinctive portrait of a changing nation and a complex society, supplemented by Oz''s own observations and reflections, that reflects an insider''s view of a country still forming its own identity. In the Land of Israel is "an exemplary instance of a writer using his craft to come to grips with what is happening politically and to illuminate certain aspects of Israeli society that have generally been concealed by polemical formulas" ( The New York Times) .