A Tale of Love and Darkness
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Hardcover edition
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| Author | Amos Oz |
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| Country | Israel |
| Language | Hebrew |
| Genre | Nonfiction novel |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
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Publication date
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2002 |
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Published in English
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November 15, 2004 |
| Media type | Print, e-book, audiobook |
| Pages | 544 pages (English hardcover) |
| Awards | National Jewish Book Award |
| ISBN | |
A Tale of Love and Darkness (Hebrew: סיפור על אהבה וחושך) is an autobiographical novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, first published in Hebrew in 2002.
The book has been translated into 28 languages and over a million copies have been sold worldwide. In 2011, a bootleg Kurdish translation was found in a bookstore in northern Iraq. Oz was reportedly delighted.
The book documents much of Oz's early life, including a number of events he previously hadn't communicated. For example, before writing the book, Oz had avoided discussing his mother's 1952 suicide with his father, or writing publicly about it.
Oz chronicles his childhood in Jerusalem at the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel, and his teenage years on Kibbutz Hulda.
His parents, mother Fania Mussman and father Ariyeh Klausner feature as prominent characters within the book. Importantly, his mother's 1952 overdose on pain killers becomes the point of exploration for the novel, launching the deep probing into other parts of his childhood and youth. As a child, he crossed paths with prominent figures in Israeli society, among them Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and David Ben-Gurion. One of his teachers was the Israeli poet Zelda. Historian Joseph Klausner was his great-uncle.
Told in a non-linear fashion, Oz's story is interwoven with tales of his family's Eastern European roots. The family's name was Klausner. By changing the name to a Hebrew one, Oz rebelled against that European background while affirming loyalty to the land of his birth.
A production company owned by Natalie Portman acquired the film rights to the book. Portman began shooting the movie in February 2014 in Jerusalem. The film marks her directorial feature film debut; she also played the role of Oz's mother, and Amir Tessler played the young Oz.
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