Amos Oz, Approaching 70, Sees Israel With a Bird’s-Eye View

[cali]

Published: April 12, 2009

ARAD, Israel — For four decades Amos Oz has been known in Israel and abroad for two things, his fervently liberal politics and his intimately observed fiction. He has always insisted that they are distinct, and so they seem. His novels and stories are not allegories on the Palestinian conflict but deeply human tales of ambiguity and sadness. His political essays, meanwhile, make their point with complete transparency.

One way he marks the separation between the two forms of writing is by using two kinds of pen, one blue, the other black, that sit on his desk in the book-lined study of his home in this quiet desert town.

“I never mix them up,” he says of the pens. “One is to tell the government to go to hell. The other is to tell stories.”

Now, as Israel prepares to mark his 70th birthday with a three-day festival in Arad and an academic conference at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, both in May, and with his latest novella coming out in English translation along with a new selection of translated fiction and nonfiction called “The Amos Oz Reader,” he offers a way of viewing his two kinds of writing through a single lens. Both usher from the same source, he says — empathy. Both are about imagining the other.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/books/13oz.html?ref=global-home