Amos Oz to be buried Monday after public pays its respects
Israel Prize winner will lie in repose in Tel Aviv from 10:30 a.m. before he is interred at the kibbutz where he was educated
Thousands are expected to pay their respects on Monday to the preeminent Israeli author Amos Oz, who died on Friday at the age of 79 after a short battle with cancer.
Oz’s body will lie in repose at Tel Aviv’s Tzavta club from 10:30 a.m., with a memorial service and speeches due to begin at noon.
His funeral will take place at 3 p.m. at Kibbutz Hulda, where he was educated, and will not include eulogies, the Ynet news site reported.
Oz was Israel’s most widely read and best-known author, and was hailed by the president on Friday as the country’s “greatest writer.”
He won dozens of awards, including the Israel Prize and Germany’s Goethe Award, and his books have been translated into 45 languages. He had repeatedly been mentioned as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but it eluded him.
Born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine in 1939, the city would provide a canvas for many of his works including “Black Box” (1987) and “In the Land of Israel.”
He is survived by his wife Nili and three children.
Considered one of the most accomplished authors in the history of Israeli literature, Oz was also among the country’s most vocal left-wing activists and supporters of a two-state solution.
The comedy of unhappy families
Oz was the only child of parents who emigrated from Russia and Poland to help establish a homeland for the Jews.
As a teen he rebelled against his upbringing, looking to put behind what he felt was his parents’ world that glamorized Europe and the West, and instead was drawn to the young pioneers who built the early state.
“I secretly dreamed that one day they would take me away with them. And make me into a fighting nation too. That my life too would become a new song, a life as pure and straightforward and simple as a glass of water on a hot day,” he wrote.
His austere childhood in the final years of British-mandate Palestine — haunted by the Holocaust and the threat of war for the land claimed by two peoples — would serve as a major theme of his literary works.
So would the suicide of his mother when he was 12, the topic of his heart-wrenching memoir “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” Seeking a break from his life in Jerusalem, he moved to a kibbutz collective farm at the age of 15 and changed his last name to Oz, Hebrew for strength and bravery.
It was while living on the kibbutz, where he would remain on and off for the next 25 years, that Oz emerged as a writer, focusing on daily life and family tribulations.
He completed high school at Kibbutz Hulda in central Israel and returned to the kibbutz after completing his mandatory military service in 1961. While working in the farming community’s cotton fields, he published his first short stories.
After earning a degree in literature from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, he spent 25 years on the kibbutz, dividing his time between writing, farming and teaching at the community’s high school.
As a reserve soldier in a tank unit, Oz fought in the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
“My work is the comedy of unhappy families, not tragedy,” he once said.
His early works, many of which were published in Hebrew by the Israeli Labor Party’s publishing house, included “Where the Jackals Howl” (1965) and “My Michael” (1968).
In a career spanning half a century, Oz published over 35 books, including 13 novels as well as children’s books and collections of short stories, and hundreds of articles on literary and political topics.
Oz’s final novel “Judas” was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. A detective story about Jesus and Judas, it was full of the other familiar elements of an Oz novel, including enigmatic characters, the complicated environs of Jerusalem, and endless questions about the State of Israel.
Speaking to The Times of Israel after it was published in 2016, Oz said there was something of his own self in each of the three “Judas” characters, but that was not unusual, he said, given that everything he writes is in some way autobiographical, originating from things he’s heard or seen, dreamed, read or fantasized about.
Peace activist
Oz was a leading voice in Israel’s peace movement and a friend of the late Shimon Peres, a former prime minister and president who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to reach a deal with the Palestinians. Oz frequently wrote essays and delivered lectures urging the country’s leaders to establish a Palestinian state as part of a peace agreement with Israel.
He was among the founders of Peace Now, a leftist organization that opposes Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and was a leading voice in the 2003 “Geneva Initiative,” an unofficial peace plan reached by leading Israeli and Palestinians. He also was a supporter and activist in Meretz, a dovish Israeli political party.
In recent years, he, along with fellow authors David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, became pillars of the country’s peace movement, which has grown increasingly marginalized over the past two decades.
Grossman, like Oz a winner of the Israel Prize in literature, said he felt “the world is diminished a little” with the novelist’s passing.
