Overview

'Beautiful and evocative' - Daily Telegraph As the Germans advance into Poland in 1939, Elisha Pomeranz, a Jewish mathematician and watchmaker, escapes into the wintry forest, leaving behind his beautiful, intelligent wife, Stefa. After the war, having evaded the concentration camps, they begin to build new lives - Stefa in Stalin's Russia and Elisha in Israel, where, as they seek their reunion, another war is brewing.

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9780099817505

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An outstandingly rich book... a pleasure to read * Times Literary Supplement * A mixture of fantasy, history, grimness and humour... often beautiful * Glasgow Herald * A lavishly gifted writer' * New York Times *

In both My Michael (1972) and Elsewhere Perhaps (1973) Oz has hinted symbolically at a metaphysical extension of contemporary Israeli lives by taking a fleeting cognizance of the curious incongruities of the country itself with its mix of men and myth, soughing wind under limitless skies. Here although he deals in part with stone-hard artifacts like streets and shops, kibbutz halls and shrieking bombs - he adds a frame of folk/allegorical fantasy. Elisha, the gentle watchmaker's son, recognizes that time is but an affectation of the mind as he shivers and starves in a Polish forest away from the Nazis. As naturally as Chagall's creatures amusingly solve gravitational entrapment, Elisha levitates - above Germans, forests, huts, ghosts, wolves. . . playing mouth organ music in the night. While his wife, Stefa, queen of Polish intellectuals, skims through other implausibilities to become a kind of comic Barbarella of Stalinist officialdom. After several changes of identity, Elisha at last in a kibbutz produces - among new and old social idealists and eternal crones at their gossip - a mathematical answer to the problem of infinity. Elisha and Stefa are in the end reunited but then disappear - to become as insubstantial as any human beings who reach too far off the earth to escape its corrosive veins of evil. A masterful aggregate of philosophical speculation, witty social commentary and solid story telling. (Kirkus Reviews)

Written in 1972, this haunting story tells the tale of Pomeranz, an imaginative mathematics teacher and his beautiful, intellectual wife, Stefa. Both Polish Jews, in 1939 Pomeranz flees their home in the face of the German advance. Less apprehensive and feeling she is Jewish only up to a point , Stefa remains determinedly behind, soon to discover her secret hope that war will bring a refreshed Europe is shockingly misconceived. Charting his protagonists' separate journeys, Amos Oz yields not so much a work of fiction as a metaphysical exploration of human existence within the framework of a novella. An author of international acclaim, themes of guilt and persecution are at the heart of Professor Oz's writings and nobody better observes the descent into casual brutishness that characterized Nazi anti-semitism. Rich in metaphor and symbolism, full of exquisite irony, here is a welcome new edition of a work that remains timelessly relevant. (Kirkus UK)

An outstandingly rich book... a pleasure to read * Times Literary Supplement * A mixture of fantasy, history, grimness and humour... often beautiful * Glasgow Herald * A lavishly gifted writer' * New York Times *

An outstandingly rich book... a pleasure to read Times Literary Supplement A mixture of fantasy, history, grimness and humour... often beautiful Glasgow Herald A lavishly gifted writer' New York Times

Author Information

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz was the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over forty languages, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. His last novel, Judas, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and won the Yasnaya Polyana Foreign Fiction Award. He received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He died in December 2018.

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