The first book by Amos Oz that I read. Started
and finished it in a quiet room in the Louvre, on a day when entry was free, it
was pouring outside, and I just had to kill time before flying out of Paris
after a few days there.
Unlike Grossman’s books for young adults, this
is a book about young adults, but not exclusively for them. It tells the story
of a Palestine torn by the British-Zionist conflict, just before it started to
be torn by the Arab-Israeli one, a time in which the Jewish were launching
terrorist attacks because – as Ben M’Hidi teaches the viewers in The Battle of Algiers – terrorism is the
weapon of the poor: “If we have your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us.
Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets”.
The entire book is written with an extremely
delicate touch. Obviously, an adult reader (but probably, given the uniqueness
of the historical moment and the way Israel has changed since, not even a young
reader) cannot identify with the main character, but this doesn’t deter from
the book, which remains a novel about a largely underexplored historical period
and with quite a number of insightful comments.
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