Flight from the Kibbutz
HOFFMAN, MARVIN
Flight from the Kibbutz A Perfect Peace By Amos Oz Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 374pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Marvin Hoffman Clinical psychologist; middle school English teacher Amos Oz—novelist,...
...Awareness of imperfections need not lead to surrender or revulsion...
...A founding member of the kibbutz, he eventually became its secretary, the highest position, served as a member of the Knesset, and is a friendly adversary of his contemporary, the reigning Prime Minister Levi Eshkol...
...This done, he follows the path of countless searchers for truth and takes to the desert in quest of that "perfect peace" his kibbutz had not yielded and death alone may bring...
...The fulfillment uncannily resembles the life that had been left behind...
...Well, now the high-flown words are rooftops and treetops...
...For his most recent work of non-fiction, In the Land of Israel, he talked with Eastern and Western Jews, hawks and doves, expansionists and accom-modationists in an effort to understand and help heal the enormous rifts that currently divide the nation...
...wonders Yolek...
...Oz' countryman Aharon Ap-pelfeld has used the same device in writing about the destruction of European Jewish society, setting his novels in the years leading up to World War II...
...As for the rest, who knows...
...While preparing his departure, Yoni gradually bequeaths Azariah his apartment, his belongings and his wife...
...Oz, the chronicler of a society built on idealism, is preoccupied here with the effects of the Zionist vision upon the visionaries and their offspring...
...As Yolek says, the first settlers gave their objectives "all kinds of high-flown names so that we could take ourselves seriously...
...They' re first-rate fanners...
...Such accomplishments should be cause for rejoicing, but in fact everything has soured: "In vain, Yolek realized, had been the whole arduous attempt to rebuild Jewish life on a new foundation...
...Ozshows that you canlook with searing honesty at the pock-marked faces of people around you and love them despite their flaws...
...The ultimate message is not gloomy...
...We are able to pull back from a greasy-smelling kibbutz tin tractor shed until we in turn see all of Israeli society, the knotted coupling of the Jewish people at "home" and in the Diaspora, and finally all of mankind struggling to find meaning and love in a radically imperfect world...
...What is going on in their heads...
...Dreams fulfilled seem to him no less corrosive and unsatisfying than dreams deferred...
...What you think makes no difference because you belong to a generation that never learned how to think...
...The title is a phrase ina Hebrew prayer for the dead...
...They've spent their whole lives being right, those old folks," declares Yoni to himself...
...Azariah is a character of uncommon neurotic vitality—a high-energy molecule who invades Yoni's ennui-laden existence with unpredictable results...
...This air of melancholy, weariness and indefinable longing pervades A Perfect Peace...
...Enter Azariah Gitlin, a self-described "Diaspora born" Jew...
...Yolek's wife Hava—he insists on calling her his "friend"—has never forgiven her husband for the role she thinks he played in forcing the departure from the kibbutz of a certain Benya Trotsky...
...Meant to be his father's crowning achievement, Yoni is a disappointment and a puzzle to the two of them...
...Love is beyond me still, perhaps it always has been," Yoni admits...
...in each glass-paneled cabinet a fancy dinner service for 12...
...Just discharged from the Israeli Army, he is desperate to join the kibbutz...
...At theend Rimona repeats the previous generation's pattern, bearing a child of uncertain paternity...
...Just who are these youngsters anyway...
...All these ex-pioneers who had skimped, saved, and borrowed to build houses, in each of them a living room...
...The hero of A Perfect Peace, Yona-tan (Yoni) Lifshitz, lives on the kibbutz where he was born with his wife Rimona, a porcelain doll of a woman whose simple-mindedness alternately appears to be saintly or psychotic...
...His own role as an advocate of the Peace Now movement, and his opposition to both the fighting in Lebanon and West Bank settlement being well-known, often it was an act of courage for him to approach men and women who find his views repugnant...
...The decision to set the narrative in 196567 allows the author and his readers to draw on their extraliterary knowledge of the future, adding further resonance to the novel's already rich overtones...
...A Perfect Peace, Oz' extraordinary new novel, is an attempt to comprehend the malaise that has ironically surfaced since Israel's stunning 1967 military victory by exploring its roots in the period immediately prior to the Six Day War...
...Only Hava knows Yoni's true paternity, and she is not above using this as a weapon against Yolek...
...If the pioneers were nonetheless successful, the psychic cost paid by their children has been prohibitive...
...Presumably they' re braveandproficient soldiers...
...Yoni's father, Yolek, was a pioneer in Palestine...
...One of the characters, for example, makes the Cassandra-like declaration, "There's a war on the way, and...
...even if we win, it will be the beginning of the end...
...But a thing or two we can do, and since we can, we must...
...Long ago that unstable young man, driven mad by his love for Hava, had unsuccessfully attempted to shoot her, Yolek and himself, then fled to Miami where he became a millionaire hotel owner...
...She has had a stillborn child, and the doctor's recommendation that she not become pregnant again is the final blow to the marriage...
...Yet much as Thoreau traveled widely in Concord, Oz encompasses his universal themes within this little sphere...
...Almost the entire story takes place inside the floodlit perimeter of a single small kibbutz...
...Yolek is intrigued by this idealistic, intense spouter of questionable Russian epigrams and idiosyncratic interpretations of Spinoza's philosophy, finding in Azariah something he does not see in Yoni: the passion and commitment of his own youth...
...Yet always with an air of melancholy about them...
...in each living room, a glass-paneled cabinet...
...middle school English teacher Amos Oz—novelist, social critic, gadfly, kibbutznik, modern-day prophet, and loyal citizen of the Stale of Israel— has sought in his novels, short stories and reportage to examine the darker, morally ambiguous aspects of his homeland...
...Even its physical world is drawn in gray, flat tones, although it contains rich, sensuous, animating details—rendered with masterly skill in Hillel Halkin's translation, as are the cadences of Oz' language...
...As the story begins, it confirms Yoni in his earlier decision to flee the confines of the collective settlement, where life is too easy, too predictable, too circumscribed by parental expectations...
Vol. 68 • August 1985 • No. 10
