Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Two days ago Amos Oz was honored with the prestigious Heinrich Heine Prize in Germany. He received this top award for “literary quality, political sensibility, his humanitarian engagement and his bold clarity and determination in trying to build bridges between Israelis and Palestinians.” Our library has twelve books by this famous contemporary Israeli author:

• A perfect peace – Set in Israel just before the Six-Day War, this novel describes life on a kibbutz, where the founders of Israel and their children struggle to come to terms with their land and with each other.
• A tale of love and darkness – Oz’s memoir, or more precisely family saga, covering 120 years. This is the latest book we have from him, published in 2003.
• Black box – An Israeli woman is happily remarried, yet obsessively attached to her former husband.
• Don’t call it night – A teenage drug overdose throws a closely knit Negev Desert settlement into turmoil – and tests the limits of a precarious love affair.
• Fima – Fima’s life in Jerusalem always manages to become enmeshed in the mundane. With wit and storytelling mastery, Oz portrays a man – and a generation – that has dreams but does nothing.
• In the land of Israel – Our only non-fiction Oz book documenting the answers from people all over Israel for the questions: where Israel had come from, was at the time of writing in 1983, and where it was headed.
• My Michael – In our oldest Oz piece, written 40 years ago, a woman with an intensive inner fantasy life finds her marriage and life more and more boring and limiting.
• Soumchi - The only book we have from Oz written for children. It is the funny story of an eleven year old boy, set in Jerusalem, right after World War II.
• The hill of evil counsel – Three stories in which history and imaginative narrative intertwine to re-create the world of Jerusalem during the last days of the British Mandate.
• The same sea – Oz’s most freeform work, a novel written as a mixture of poetry and prose, interactions and inter-emotions of a son, his girlfriend and his widowed father.
• To know a woman. – Emotional and intellectual recovery of a retiring Israeli spy from his wife’s death to society.
• Unto death; Crusade and Late Love – Two novellas showing the atmosphere of hatred in which Jews must live, die, and struggle for rationality both historically and in the present.