A Tale of Love and Darkness

Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once an engrossing family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.

Amos Oz takes us on a bold journey through his childhood and adolescence - with a quixotic child's-eye view of Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the forties and fifties - and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father and his dreamy, romantic mother. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. At the heart of this moving story is the suicide of his mother when Oz was twelve-and-a-half years old. Soon after, still a gawky adolescent, he turns his back on his father, leaves home, joins a kibbutz, and changes his name.

The story covers 120 years of family history, a tale full of loneliness and loss, of laughter and farce, that moves between Russia and Jerusalem, Poland and Tel Aviv, Lituanian and Ukranian villages, Kibbutz Hulda on Israel's coastal plane and Arad in the Negev Desert. In search of the remote roots of his family tragedy, Oz reveals the secrets and skeletons of four generations of Chekhovian dreamers, scholars, failed businessmen, fierce women, world reformers, old-world womanizers, and rebellious black sheep.

And so from the depths of sorrow ina small boy's life evolves the stunning chronicle of a people and the extraordinary story of a great writer's beginnings.

~from jacket