Between Friends

By Amos Oz

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: A “gorgeous, rueful collection of eight linked stories” capturing the collective dreams of Israel in the 1950s (Chicago Tribune).
 
These eight interconnected stories, set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yekhat, draw masterful profiles of idealistic men and women enduring personal hardships in the shadow of one of the greatest collective dreams of the twentieth century. A devoted father who fails to challenge his daughter’s lover, an old friend, a man his own age; an elderly gardener who carries on his shoulders the sorrows of the world; a woman writing perversely poignant letters to her husband’s mistress.
 
Each of these stories is a luminous human and literary study; together they offer an eloquent portrait of an idea, and of a charged and fascinating epoch. Award-winning writer Amos Oz, who spent three decades living on a kibbutz, is at home and at his best in this “lucid and heartbreaking” award-winning collection (The Guardian).

“Oz lifts the veil on kibbutz existence without palaver. His pinpoint descriptions are pared to perfection . . . His people twitch with life.” —The Scotsman
 
“A collection of stories . . . that boasts the sense, scope and unity of a novel . . . Breathtaking.” —Irish Examiner
 
“A complex and melancholic vision of people struggling to transcend their individuality for the sake of mundanely idealist goals.” —The Times Literary Supplement

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9780547985596

Amos Oz

AMOS OZ (1939–2018) was born in Jerusalem. He was the recipient of the Prix Femina, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Primo Levi Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award, among other international honors. His work, including A Tale of Love and Darkness and In the Land of Israel, has been translated into forty-four languages. 

Book preview

The King of Norway

ON OUR KIBBUTZ, Kibbutz Yekhat, there lived a man, Zvi Provizor, a short fifty-five-year-old bachelor who had a habit of blinking. He loved to transmit bad news: earthquakes, plane crashes, buildings collapsing on their occupants, fires, and floods. He read the papers and listened to all the news broadcasts early in the morning, so that he could catch us at the entrance to the dining hall and astound us with the story of two hundred and fifty coal miners hopelessly trapped somewhere in China or six hundred passengers drowned when a ferry capsized in a storm in the Caribbean. He also used to memorize obituaries. Always first to know which famous people had died, he would inform the entire kibbutz. One morning he stopped me on the path in front of the clinic.

Ever hear of a writer named Wislavsky?

Yes. Why?

He died.

Sorry to hear it.

Writers die, too.

And another time he caught me when I was working the dining-hall shift:

I saw in the obituaries that your grandfather died.

Yes.

And three years ago, your other grandfather died.

Yes.

So this one was the last.

Zvi Provizor was the kibbutz gardener. He would go out at five every morning, reposition the sprinklers, till the soil in the flower beds, plant and prune and water, mow lawns with the noisy mower, spray against aphids, and spread organic and chemical fertilizer. Attached to his belt was a small transistor radio that provided him with a constant infusion of disastrous news:

Did you hear? A huge massacre in Angola.

Or: The Minister of Religious Affairs died. They just announced it ten minutes ago.

The other kibbutz members avoided him. In the dining hall, they rarely joined him at his table. On summer evenings he would sit alone on the green bench at the foot of the large lawn in front of the dining hall and watch the children playing on the grass. The breeze billowed out his shirt, drying his sweat. A hot summer moon shone red as it rose above the tall cypress trees. One evening Zvi Provizor greeted a woman named Luna Blank who was sitting alone on an adjacent bench.

Did you hear? he said to her sadly. In Spain an orphanage burned down and eighty orphans died of smoke inhalation.

Luna, a forty-five-year-old widowed teacher, wiped the sweat from her brow with a handkerchief and said, That’s horrible.

Only three survivors were rescued, Zvi said, and they’re in critical condition.

We all respected his dedication to his work: never, in the twenty-two years that he’d lived on the kibbutz, had a single sick day been noted on his time sheet. Thanks to him, the kibbutz bloomed. Every unused strip of land was planted with seasonal flowers. Here and there he had put in rock gardens where he planted varieties of cactus. He had erected wooden trellises for grapevines. In front of the dining hall he installed a burbling fountain filled with goldfish and aquatic plants. He had a good aesthetic sense and everyone appreciated it.

But behind his back we called him the Angel of Death and gossiped about him: he didn’t have and had never had an interest in women, we would say. Or in men, for that matter. One young fellow, Roni Shindlin, did a marvelous imitation of Zvi that made us roar with laughter. In the afternoon, when the kibbutz members sat on their porches and drank coffee or played with their children on the small lawns in front of their houses, Zvi Provizor would go to the clubhouse to read the newspapers in the company of five or six solitary men like him, avid readers and debaters, aging bachelors, widowers, or divorcés.

From his corner, Reuvkeh Roth, a small bald man with large batlike ears, would mumble that retaliatory raids only escalated the violence because revenge begets revenge and retaliation begets retaliation.

The others would immediately attack him: What are you talking about? We can’t let them get away with it! Restraint and appeasement only make the Arabs more brazen.

Zvi Provizor would blink and say, In the end, it’ll turn into a war. It can only cause a terrible war.

And Emanuel Glozman, the stutterer, would say excitedly, W-w-war. Very g-g-good. We’ll w-w-win and t-t-take their l-l-land all the w-w-way to the J-J-Jordan.

Reuvkeh Roth would think out loud: Ben Gurion is a great chess player. He always sees five moves ahead. Except that everything with him is always by force.

On that subject, Zvi Provizor would prophesy gloomily, If we lose, the Arabs will come and wipe us out. If we win, the Russians will come and blow us up.

Emanuel Glozman would plead, E-e-enough, friends, qu-qu-quiet. Let m-m-me read the p-p-papers in p-p-peace.

And Zvi, after a few moments’ silence, would say, Did you hear? It says here that the King of Norway has liver cancer. And the head of our regional council has cancer, too.

Whenever Roni Shindlin, the comedian, saw Zvi at the shoemaker’s or by the clothing storeroom, he would ask him mockingly, So, Angel of Death, what plane crashed today?

Zvi Provizor and Luna Blank fell into a routine: they talked every evening. He would sit on the right-hand edge of the left bench at the foot of the lawn and she would sit near him, on the left-hand edge of the right bench. He would blink as he spoke to her and she, wearing a pretty sleeveless sundress, would crumple her handkerchief between her fingers. Praising the kibbutz gardens, the fruit of his labor, she said that thanks to him, they lived on a green meadow, in the shade of blossoming orchards, among blooming flower beds. She had a weakness for fancy words. A third-grade teacher, she made excellent, delicate pencil drawings that hung on the walls of our small apartments. Her face was round and smiling and her eyelashes long, though her neck was slightly wrinkled and she had thin legs and almost no breasts. Her husband had been killed several years earlier while doing reserve duty on the Gaza border and they’d had no children. The kibbutz members considered her an admirable figure, a woman who had overcome tragedy and poured her entire soul into teaching. Zvi talked to her about the different species of roses and she nodded eagerly, as if agreeing with every word. Then he gave her a detailed description of the horrors of the locust plague that was devastating Sudan.

Luna said, You’re a very sensitive person.

Zvi blinked quickly and said, Sudan doesn’t have much greenery as it is.

Luna said, Why do you take all the sorrows of the world on your shoulders?

And Zvi replied, Closing your eyes to the cruelty of life is, in my opinion, both stupid and sinful. There’s very little we can do about it. So we have to at least acknowledge it.

One summer evening she invited Zvi to her place for coffee. He came in his after-work clothes, long khaki trousers and a short-sleeved light-blue shirt. His radio was still attached to his belt, and at eight o’clock he excused himself and listened to the news headlines. Hanging on the walls of Luna Blank’s room were several of her pencil drawings in simple frames, sketches of dreamy young girls and landscapes, rocky hills and olive trees. Beneath the window was a double bed with embroidered Oriental pillows. The row of books on the white bookshelf was arranged by height, from tall art books of paintings by Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin, to shorter volumes of the Cassuto Bible, and, finally, a series of squat little novels published by Hasifria Le’Am. In the middle of the room was a round coffee table with two plain armchairs on either side. The table was covered with an embroidered tablecloth and set for two with coffee cups and plates for biscuits.

Zvi Provizor said, Your room is very nice, and added, Clean. Neat.

Embarrassed, Luna Blank said, Thank you. I’m glad.

But there was no gladness in her voice, only an awkward tension.

Then they drank coffee and ate biscuits and spoke of ornamental trees and fruit trees, of the discipline problems at school now that everything was permitted, of bird migration.

Zvi said, I read in the newspaper that in Hiroshima, ten years after the bomb, there were still no birds.

Luna told him again, You take all the sorrows of the world on your shoulders.

She also said, The day before yesterday, I saw a hoopoe on a low branch outside my window.

And so they began to meet regularly in the early-evening hours, on a bench in the garden, in the shade of a dense bougainvillea, or over coffee in Luna’s room. Zvi would come home from work at four, shower, comb his hair in front of the mirror, change into his ironed khaki trousers and light-blue shirt, and go to join her. Sometimes he would bring seedlings of annuals for her to plant in her small garden. Once he brought her a volume of Yaakov Fichman’s poems. She gave him poppy-seed biscuits in a bag, and a pencil drawing of two cypress trees and a bench. But at eight or eight thirty they would say good night and Zvi would return to his monastic room where the smell of bachelordom hung heavily in the air.

In the dining hall Roni Shindlin said that the Angel of Death had spread its wings over the Black Widow. In the clubhouse, later, Reuvkeh Roth teased Zvi affectionately, So the hand has found a glove, eh?

But Zvi and Luna were not upset by the gossip and the sarcasm. The connection between them seemed to grow stronger every day. He told her that in his free time, he was translating a novel by the Polish writer Iwaszkiewicz into Hebrew. The book was full of gentleness and suffering. Iwaszkiewicz believed that the human condition was absurd but touching. Luna listened, her head slightly tilted, lips parted, pouring hot coffee into his cup, as if the coffee were a kind of compensation for Iwaszkiewicz’s sorrow as well as a consolation for his own. She felt that their relationship was precious and she appreciated the way it filled her days, which until then had been so flat and monotonous. One night, she dreamed that they were on a horse together, her breasts pressed against his back and her arms around his waist, riding along a valley between high hills where a frothing river twisted and turned. She decided not to tell Zvi about this dream, even though she had described other dreams to him in detail. Zvi, for his part, blinked and told her that as a child in the Polish town of Yanov, he had dreamed of being a student. Instead, he had been drawn into the newly formed chalutz youth movement and had given up his plans to study. Even so, he had never stopped learning. Carefully gathering the crumbs from the tablecloth, Luna said, "You must have been

Reviews for Between Friends

[ericlee_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I lived for nearly 18 years on a kibbutz. Amos Oz, who passed a way a few weeks ago, also lived for a number of years on a kibbutz. This collection of stories takes place on a fictional kibbutz, with a cast of characters who pop up in each other's stories and lives. One of the striking things about living on a kibbutz was how one knew people as neighbours, friends, co-workers, lovers. No one was just "the guy who repaired the shoes" or "the woman who worked with the chickens". Everyone was three dimensional, and that is clear in these wonderful stories. It is a sensitive, accurate, and somewhat sad account of what used to be called "the experiment that did not fail". The final chapter, "Esperanto" was especially beautiful, and one has to wonder if Oz was deliberatedly comparing the twin dreams of a universal language and that of a more equal and more just society.

[wassilissa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amos Oz erzählt in seinen Texten vom fiktiven Kibbutz Jikhat. Wahrscheinlich um 1950/1960 herum spielen seine Geschichten, die die damalige Diskussion um Kibbutz - Ideologie aufgreifen und mit Menschen verknüpfen: Die Frage, ob Kinder bei den Eltern oder im Kinderhaus schlafen sollen, ob fremde Leiharbeiter im Kibbutz arbeiten dürfen, wie viel oder wenig Selbstbestimmung es etwa bei der Wahl der Ausbildung geben kann, der Generationenkonflikt zwischen den Überlebenden der Shoa und den Nachgeborenen. Mit klaren Strichen skizziert der Autor die Prinzipientreue der Chaverim und die daraus entstehende Kleinlichkeit. Auch das Verhältnis zu den Palästinensern scheint immer wieder durch. Es schadet wahrscheinlich nicht, ein bisschen was über Kibbutzgeschichte zu wissen. Doch das Buch gibt auch ohne Vorkenntnisse einen guten Einblick. Die Geschichte "Vater" über den Jungen Mosche, der mit dem Bus in die Stadt fährt, um seinen kranken Vater zu besuchen, erscheint mir sehr autobiografisch zu sein. Hier fühlt man sich an die "Geschichte von Liebe und Finsternis" erinnert. Herzzerreißend ist die Geschichte "Ein kleiner Junge", die die Einsamkeit und Traurigkeit eines Kindes und seines Vaters in der kibbutzeigenen Trennung thematisiert. "Deir Adschlun" ist der Name eines fiktiven arabischen Ortes, der von Israelis zerstört wurde. Dorthin flieht Jikhat, denn er möchte Weg aus dem Kibbutz, am liebsten das Angebot seines in Italien lebenden Onkels annehmen und zu ihm gehen um zu studieren. Doch erst in einigen Jahen wird er an der Reihe für ein Studium sein.Nachdenklich stimmt die letzte Geschichte "Esperanto". Der Holocaust-Überlebende Kibbutz-Schuster Martin ist ein prinzipientreuer Kibbutznik und ein begeisterter Anhänger von Esperanto: Wenn die Menschen eine gemeinsame Sprache sprächen, würde es keine Kriege mehr geben. Wie ehrenvoll und anrührend ist diese Hoffnung, der der todkranke biszum Ende anhängt. Die Einwände, etwa dass auch Deutsche und deutsche Juden die selbe Sprache gesprochen hätten, bleiben unwidersprochen, Am Ebde stirbt Martin und seine Beerdigung wirkt wie der Abgesang einer ganzen Ära. " Solche Menschen hin gibt es fast nicht mehr". Es gibt heute noch Kibbutzim, doch spielen sie in Israel nicht mehr die große Rolle. Der Traum des friedlichen sozialistischen Zusammenlebens hat such nicht in letzter Konsequenz verwirklicht - doch er ist auch nicht gescheitert. Ein schönes ruhiges Buch, das mir im Lauf des Lesens immer besser gefallen hat.

[mkboylan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oz is an award-winning Israeli author of both fiction and non-fiction.  I've been reading about Israel and Palestine this year and knew this would expand my knowledge further.  It is also a book of short stories, something I have never read and wanted to try.  The very first story, about a cranky old man who constantly complains about the injustices in the world, touched me deeply, but then I began to drift.  I kept thinking I needed an intense thriller type book to hold my attention away from the current sadness in life that I don't want to think about such as my failing mom.  But I kept coming back to this book and these stories and found the experience to be similar to my annual trip to the desert.  When I go to the desert it takes me while to settle in.  Everything is the same color.  But as I walk daily through the desert the subtleties begin to sink in and I see the multitude of colors, plants, blossoms, skittering critters and footprints.  Reading Oz was like that.  I began to see the subtleties in the people living in this kibbutz.  I saw their strengths and their weaknesses and the way they complemented the whole person.  Then I began to see how each person complemented the others living in the kibbutz.  This then worked its way into my perception of my own life and it too began to look beautiful.

[polaris4_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

On our kibbutz, Kibbutz Yekhat, there lived a man, Zvi Provizor, a short fifty-five year old bachelor who had a habit of blinking. He loved to transmit bad news: earthquakes, plane crashes, buildings collapsing on their occupants, fires and floods.With these opening two sentences I am there. I know exactly who Zvi Provizor is, and I know who we're dealing with in the opening story of Amos Oz's latest collection of short stories. These are a series of eight vignettes set in a fictional collective settlement of late '50s or early '60s Israel. It's a place that the reader will come to know surprisingly well for so slim a volume. The tales are above all about humanity.I lived on a kibbutz once for several years, and no one of those communities is quite like another. That said, there are though certain traits and themes and character types that do tend to crop up in every one I ever encountered or heard about. Oz has captured with an amazing economy of words, and a clarity that is so satisfying, precisely who might live there and what preoccupies them.In "The King of Norway" our blinking bachelor Zvi and Luna Blank, a widow, fall into a new routine - talking every evening. "Two Women" exchange letters - Osnat the launderess has recently become separated, and Ariella, who works in the chicken coop and heads the culture committee, is the tall, slim divorcée to whom Boaz has run. The title story sees Nahum, a widower of about fifty, approaching the subject of his only remaining child, Edna, having moved in with David Dagan, a teacher and one of the kibbutz founders and leaders - a man his own age. "Father" is a story which I think is the most autobiographical: Sixteen year old Moshe is a 'boarder' newly arrived at Yekhat after his mother has died, and father and now uncle have both fallen ill. With the greatest poignancy we see Moshe finish work early one day and make the difficult trip to visit his ailing father. To anyone who has read Oz's 'A Tale of Love and Darkness' - this is a glimpse of what might have happened next. I was extremely moved."Little Boy" is another heartbreaker: The emotional volatility of the shared children's housing hits dad Roni in a way that doesn't quite affect mum Leah the same way. "At Night" sees Yoav the kibbutz general secretary turn night guard for the week. Nina needs his help with a problem that won't wait until morning. In "Deir Ajloun", Yotam the young adult son of another widow, Henia, receives an invitation from Uncle Arthur to study in Milan. Whatever will the general assembly have to say? The final story, "Esperanto", is about an older member of the kibbutz - Martin, a holocaust survivor who hid from the Nazis in Holland. Martin is the community shoemaker and is a former Esperanto teacher; he has trouble breathing and is dying. He is an anarchist to the very end:And once, when two brisk nurses came in to change his pyjamas, he grinned suddenly and told them that death itself was an anarchist. 'Death is not awed by status, possessions, power or titles; we are all equal in its eyes.' All of the characters we've met are present in this final tale, though they crop up here and there in the other stories - maybe on the path, or making a speech in a meeting - just as they do on any kibbutz. Amos Oz has written a first class and moving collection of interwoven stories. The final mosaic is a piece of art to behold. I had to pace myself to read this book as slowly as I could, I wanted to savour its quality for as long as possible. (Perhaps I should have just torn through it and reread it immediately?) Five stars and highly recommended.