Farewell to writer Amos Oz, who had recently said he was in favor of an exam before he could vote

Israeli writer Amos Oz passed away today in Tel Aviv at the age of 79. The announcement was made by Israeli media, and the news was later confirmed by his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger, who tweeted, “My beloved father, Amos Oz, a wonderful family man, an author, a man of peace and moderation, passed away peacefully today after a short battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his loved ones and knew it until the end. May his legacy continue to improve the world.”

Born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem in 1939, the writer changed his surname when, as a teenager, after being deeply scarred by his mother’s death by suicide, he went to live on the kibbutz in Hulda and changed his surname to “Oz,” which, in Hebrew, means “strength.” Amos Oz was not only an important writer, author of volumes translated worldwide, but also one of his country’s most influential intellectuals: politically engaged, since the 1960s he has been an advocate of the so-called “two-state solution” as a way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and involving the creation of two states, one Jewish and one Arab, in historic Palestine).

His books include, in particular, Michael mio, published in 1968 (and, in Italian, in 1975 by Bompiani), a work that tells the story of a couple against the backdrop of the events that characterize Israeli history in the 1950s, and especially Una storia di amore e di tenebra (2002), an autobiographical novel. His latest novel, 2017’s Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, however, is another love story, about a couple separated by events during World War II and longing to see each other again. For his literary works, Oz has won the 1998 Israel Prize for Literature, the 2005 Goethe Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the 2007 Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature, and the 2008 Primo Levi International Prize, among other awards. Oz was also the winner of the first International Book Fair Prize, awarded in 2010.

In one of his last public appearances, in Taormina in June at the Taobuk Award for Literay Excellence: in an interview with ANSA, he had spoken about his business, saying that a writer should never talk about the book before completing it (“while writing it is like being in the condition of a pregnant woman, and a woman waiting to give birth should never be x-rayed”), and he had also spoken out on many current issues, from separations between parents and children of migrants in America (“there should never be a situation where children are separated from their parents. Separation does not work. The last time children were separated from their parents was in the Nazi era.”), to the suffering of refugees (“What strikes me so much about refugees, currently in Europe, is their suffering and hopelessness.I think the only way to solve the problem is to deal with it at home. If something had been done in the past to solve the problems of the third world, we would not be in this situation now.”) to the problems of democracy (“like you take an exam to get your driver’s license, it wouldn’t hurt for citizens to take a simple exam that attests to their knowledge of the rules of democracy, before they vote.”).

Pictured: Amos Oz in 2013. Ph. Credit.

Farewell to writer Amos Oz, who had recently said he was in favor of an exam before he could vote

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