Amos Oz is renowned in Israel for his courageous political stance as a secular social-democrat, having lived on a Kibbutz for thirty years and being a leading voice in the peace movement.  He has won numerous literary awards as listed in his Wikipedia entry.

In his latest novel Rhyming Life and Death, Oz addresses the nature of writing fiction by letting his readers in on the internal reflections of the “Author”, a fictional writer, who is invited to attend a public reading of his work in Tel Aviv.  During the following eight hours we read of his preparation for the reading, the event itself and then his wanderings around the city through the night-time.

The Author anticipates the questions he is likely to be asked by the audience after the reading -

• Why do you write?
• Why do you write the way you do?
• Are you trying to influence your readers and if so how?
• Do you constantly cross out and correct or do you write straight out of your head?
• What is it like to be a famous writer?
• Do you write with a pen or a computer?

. . . and so on, and on, and on. The Author sits in a café down the road from the literary centre to try to prepare his answers to these questions, but his thoughts are taken up by the waitress, with her “shapely, attractive legs”.  He steals a look at her face, and finds it pleasant, sunny, with her hair tied back with a red rubber band.  While he is waiting for his omelette and salad he begins to imagine her life, giving her the name “Ricky” as he writes her personal history in his head.  We, the readers, are drawn into the creative process, as “Ricky” takes form before our eyes (this is perhaps a little like looking into a mirror placed in front of another mirror – the fictional “Author” creates a fictional personal for the twice-fictional “Ricky”).

The Author notices two men sitting at an adjacent table, one looking like a gangster’s henchman in a film.  The Author names him Mr Leon and another story emerges as the Author lets his two new characters create a conversation (imaginary of course), about a man they  know who won the lottery, Ovadya Hazzam, and spent all his winnings on cars and Russian blondes and is now dying of cancer.

After eating his meal, the Author makes his way to the Cultural Centre, stories of his new characters running through his mind as he walks.   He is met by an elderly bureaucrat who wastes no time in trying to forge a bond with the Author, on the basis of their shared struggle for values of culture and ideas, “strengthening the ramparts of civilisation”.  The Author is introduced to the audience and the reading commences.  A professional reader reads extracts from his work (more of her later), and the Author’s mind wanders, looking at individuals in the audience and making up more biographies for them one by one- the young struggling author, a student radical, a trade union official, a culture thirsty woman.

At this point I began to recognise the process going on in the Author’s mind as I thought about my last train journey and remembered wondering about the people sitting alongside and opposite me.   We humans are inquisitive about those we encounter and want to know about their family life, their jobs, their homes.  Or perhaps we want to classify them alongside others we know, to make instant judgements about them and to fit them into little slots which save us having to get to know them too well. There is much in this book for the literary festival-goer.  Do you think the authors being interviewed always give authentic answers to your questions?   Amos Oz thinks otherwise -

The Author appears at his best, and replied to the audiences questions patiently, modestly and seriously.  Occasionally he uses simple analogies or examples from everyday life.  He takes his time as he expounds the difference between explaining and telling a story.  He cites in passing, Cervantes, Gogol, Balzac, and even Chekhov and Kafka.  As he speaks, he is amazed at everything:  that he agreed to take part in this event, that he has not prepared for it properly, amazed at the words that are coming from his mouth, even though as he pronounces them it is totally clear to him that he does not agree with what he is saying, and worse than that, the truth is that he does not have the faintest shadow of an answer to the real, central questions, and he has no intrinsic interest in the things that his mouth is pouring forth, independently of him.

The event comes to an end, and the Author, while not being in the least bit interested in the professional reader, Rochelle Reznik, who has read so many of his words, finds himself manoeuvring to have  an encounter with her, by offering to walk her home.  The shy and under-confident woman is unable to find the right excuses to avoid getting involved with the Author, and the two lonely people wander around the neighbourhood, the Author trying to persuade himself that he finds her sexually attractive, so desperate is he for authentic human contact (people who live in their minds being so fixated on their imagination they are only able to relate to artificial constructs, avatars of real people, rather than the simple reality that confronts them daily?).

The outcome is sad for all concerned but is mixed up with the fate of all the imaginary characters he has constructed along the way.  What is fiction, what is reality, when, as a writer, your daily life is spent solidifying phantoms into flesh and blood?

This book would appeal to anyone who is interested in how fiction comes to be written.  It is also a statement about how humans relate to one another, often filling in the gaps in their knowledge with speculation.  And finally, it offers some thoughts on what it is to be a male in late middle-age, with fantasy having to substitute for reality when it comes to overcoming loneliness – fortunate are those males who are not casting around for a new relationship when their hair is thinning and their libido is dwindling.

I am not qualified to judge whether the translation by Nicholas de Lange from modern Hebrew is good, but the book certainly reads very smoothly and captures the dry, detached tone of the inner life of the unnamed “Author”.

In the midst of the story is of course the Holocaust, but it features more as an ironic exit room for many of the Kahns and Engelmann’s, for Eichner does not dwell on the horrors, but reports that such and such “turned his face to the wall and starved to death in the Theresienstadt concentration camp” – after all, the horrors are well known, and perhaps Eichner realised that he had little to add to those more detailed accounts from other authors.  However, more on this towards the end of this review.

The story begins in Tapolca, near Lake Balaton in Hungary, where the Kahn’s are wealthy estate owners.  However, the story begins with the narrator’s grandmother, Sidonie, at the age of 17 deciding to marry a poor shoe-maker.  Nobody can persuade her otherwise, and she even escapes from virtual house-arrest to go to the boy she has chosen for herself, before long returning home expecting a baby.

Sidonie is a resourceful girl and much to her parents’ disgust, starts selling vegetables from a market stall.  She is an ambitious young woman and gets her way in everything she sets her heart on, and soon the young family are loading all their belongings onto a cart and making a terribly arduous journey to Vienna.

Despite initial hardship, the family prosper in Vienna and another generation takes the stage, as prosperous clothing retailers.  We read their stories and hear how they bicker and fight, but remain united in the face of increasing anti-Jewish feeling during the 1930s.  By this time, the narrator is a young man, and manages to escape out of Austria into Belgium where he manages to get on one of the last ships taking Jewish émigrés to London.  This is very much the author’s own story,for the book is at least partly autobiographical.

In the second-half of the book, the narrator describes a lengthy episode in the 1930s when his father and his father’s brother were in dispute over their joint business enterprise.  Eichner reproduce pages of correspondence between the two men, showing the extreme bitterness which led them to break up their business.  The wrangling and personal attacks reached a terrible pitch causing the family to try to intervene.  Alas, the two men could not be reconciled and a terrible tragedy occurred as a result.

There is much Jewish-related content throughout the book.  Hans Eichner frequently digresses from his narrative to tell Jewish stories and jokes and to tell folk-lorish tales of encounters with rabbis and ancestors.  He also keeps flashing forward to describe the narrator’s own situation as a veterinary surgeon in modern-day Haifa.  These interruptions to the narrative show how a family is linked across the generations by its own culture and its own saga, with people from earlier generations still influencing events in the present.

In the final section of this book we read of the narrtor’s life after the war-years as an academic in Canada.  He taught German, speaking with his students “about Goethe and Holderlin, about Keller and Storm, about Kafka, Thomas Mann and Brecht, but never about the Holocaust”.  With increasing realisation of his ignorance of this subject he went to the library and began to read.  Within a few days he had appalling stomach pains and “images of horror pursued me into sleep until I hardly dared to go to bed any more”.

When he finally stopped reading the Holocaust literature, the narrator realised that he had hardly done a thing while these dreadful events were taking place other than to live a life of pleasure and sleep with his girlfriends.  A realisation dawned on him that he had to be part of the new state of Israel and to serve it in a productive way. An idea comes to him to re-train as a veterinarian and to emigrate to Israel to look after the livestock, and before long he has enrolled on a five year course to achieve his aim.

I am pleased that I was able to read this book and can say that it sits well among other books describing this period by authors such as Thomas Mann or Stefan Zweig.  It is a very “European” book and I would say that is is an useful contribution to an understanding of what mid-20th century persecution meant for Jewish-European families.  Despite its fictional form, the author explains that he ended up writing a novel, although “there is little in it that didn’t actually happen”.  The freedom of the novel form and the use of the narrator’s voice has brought the book to life far more than would have been possible if he had simply recounted these events as they happened.

The theme of the novel is unique – I had never heard of the massacre of Jews in Lisbon in 1506, and it was fascinating to read of the cultural milieu of the time, and to see how these events impacted on the families in the Jewish ghetto.  The relationship of Jew to Gentile is described well, and shows how a delicate web of trans-cultural relationships sustained the commercial world, but how easily this could be broken in the mad rush to blame Jews for economic troubles.  Zimler shows how the progrom was led by Dominican friars who used the most inflammatory descriptions of the Jews in order to inflame the Gentile community and it is particularly shocking to see how fundamentalist Christianity can be as cruel a cult as any.

The novel is not all darkness and terror (although this features liberally!). It also contains a fine detective story as Berekiah seeks to discover who murdered his uncle Abraham, the expert Kabbalist and book illustrator.

All literature of Jewish persecution points eventually to the greater Holocaust of the last century and Zimler inevitably writes with knowledge of the far larger scale events of Nazi Germany.  And indeed his readers too cannot help but look ahead to see how the Lisbon progroms forshadowed the rabid persecutions of the Hitler regime.  It is important in my view to read this book as the first volume of Zimler’s epic story of the Zarco line, and having come to his work through the latest book, The Seventh Gate, it is fascinating to see the roots of the later work in this, the first volume.