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The personal, the universal and the Zionist vision

The afternoon audience of slightly senior people seemed filled with anticipation about Natalie Portman’s rendering of “A Tale of Love and Darkness.”
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August 26, 2016

The afternoon audience of slightly senior people seemed filled with anticipation about  Natalie Portman’s rendering of “A Tale of Love and Darkness.”  It may have been the kind of giddy pride that comes when a celebrity legitimizes the audience’s interest.   For some members of that audience—and for this reviewer– the anticipation was reversed because one of the most famous writers of the Hebrew literary renaissance, Amos Oz, was being represented in a medium that has often eluded the other literary greats of Israel.  (There are super Israeli movies and TV shows these days, but few renderings of novels onto film.)   And, indeed, while it has been the celebrity of actor-director Natalie Portman that has caught early attention before the movie was released, she manages to play a subdued and self-effacing role in the movie itself.   Attention is concentrated, then, on what counts;  the quality of the movie and its convincing acting , and the skill with which a long and somewhat shambling original narrative has been made accessible as a movie.   (I won’t cite some of the tidbits that make the book so memorable, but the English translation is wonderful, so curious readers might want to take it on.) 

It’s a universal story, to be sure, even though it is set within modern  Jewish history’s most crucial epoch.    A family escaping the escalation of tragedy in Europe finds its own tragedy in the emerging Palestinian Jewish nation: the wife’s  longing (melancholy become illness) regarding a lost Europe is made more gruesome in the dingy life the family leads in the twilit cellar: three rooms for eating, sleeping and hovering over a brilliant son—a pictures that was much a part of Jerusalem in the 1940’s.  Many émigrés tried to supplant the cafes of Europe’s capitals but they become the failed efforts to establish that elegance on the hardcscrabble soil of the middle East—(although Tel Aviv eventually got close).  That sometimes comic failure merges, in this movie, with a father’s hopes of becoming an important scholar mocked by the trivial realities of the bookish life,  (see the movie “Footnote”)  ; and the momentous historical event that is taking place in the midst of this Chekhovian tale of loss and darkness are all seen through the eyes of young Amos Klausner ( to become Amos Oz when his mother dies and once he abandons his father for life on a kibbutz. ) 

The movie cannot replicate what Oz achieved in nearly 600 pages: a weave of personal tales and national events, and the perspective of a grown man—identified as the legendary Amos Oz– who refracts the witness of his childhood persona, and along the way tells stories about the development of the new nation. Portman chose the intimate story—the family story—and managed some of the historical momentousness through film clips of war, occasional narration of desultory relations with friendly Arabs, and descriptions of the constant disappointments of these urban pioneers.

Portman avoids the danger of telling too much; but she does capture a few of these great episodes on film.  One of the best is a hurried excursion to the local pharmacy for the weekly phone call to siblings in Tel Aviv”(excerpted in The New Yorker) :  “Hello, how are you, how’s the weather; nothing new here; we’ll call you next week”—it is, in one way or another the universal tale of every immigrant Jewish family caught up in pre-technology confusion.  But in pre-state Israel a special resonance—the alienation that Amos Oz loves to associate with Chekhov.  Every family event from social visits to efforts to plant a little garden in the yard is accompanied by tears of failure and alienation.  And, as in Chekhov, sometimes in this movie one wonders whether there isn’t a bit too much melodrama.  But melodrama suits these people who bear every burdensome fantasy of pained and obsessed parents about their lyrical child.  (In one scene, he adumbrates the literary greatness that was to become Amos zoz  by evading bullies through his story telling.)  In brilliantly acted scenes, Amos is the upbeat pole of the tragic dyad. 

Once the audience settles down, and realizes that even the singular event in modern post-Holocaust Jewish history can become  a personal story, all can be forgotten or put aside to experience a contorted intensity that is both personal and national.     

The audience can return, upon reflection after the movie has ended, to the alienation that must have been felt by so many of these urban pioneers, forced to live in the crowded and dusty streets of Jerusalem, longing for the sonatas and preludes of Central European music, stressed by the contrast between middle eastern dust and the grandeur of Europe’s rivers, bridges and culture.  The Klausner family was, then, caught off guard by new landscape new language and new and unexpected disappointments because the  the “New Man” of near erotic fantasy first had to go through a period of profound loneliness.

As the poet Lea Goldberg wrote in her poem Tel Aviv 1935:

How can the air of this little city/bear so many/childhood memories, abandoned loves, and rooms that have emptied out somewhere.  …

{they are like} pictures blackening in a camera…

Goldberg’s poem is not known to many Americans; but its theme of estrangement is condensed in this remarkable movie; for Goldberg, Tel Aviv, for Oz and Portman, Jerusalem.   

What for Oz was a complex interweaving of the national story with his personal biography, and of humor with unbearable tragedy, becomes a personal story of a young boy’s sense of the struggles of one family to find a place in the illusion of the new land, while the daily reality mocks the illusion.  Yet the illusion prevails, or at least hopes for the fulfillment of that illusion.  People may have gathered because the movie is set in Israel, but they wound up seeing a serious movie at last that isn’t per se about “the situation” or about a specific kind of Israeli or a singular political struggle, or a screed about the greatness of Israel: but a deep and real story about how life looks to a boy who was to become one of Western literature’s masters of words and story. I do think we are supposed to know that this is Amos Oz we are talking about—that the movie is more than just anyone’s story.  But it is everyone’s story as well. 

When Oz was interviewed for “Writer’s Block” at Temple Emanuel about a decade ago, he insisted on breaking down the distinction between biography and fiction—into the word narrative.  People who study narrative know that point of view, selection of material,  and the refractions of individual memory play a huge part in what eventually finds its way into a written narrative or a movie.  A child’s eyes in the memory of an adult man, and two great artists—a writer and a director-actress  have brought to life a movie that bears watching even if you’re not caught up in the hum and buzz of contemporary Israel.  If you are part of the Jewish-political-historical gossip, you will enjoy a double reward that proves that sadness depicted beautifully promises its own kind of elevation. 

William Cutter is Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Literature, Herbew Union College, Los Angeles

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