Between Friends, a collection of short stories by Amos Oz; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013, 179 pages, ISBN 978-0-547-98558-9, $24.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — In “Eleanor Rigby,” the Beatles’ songwriting duo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney asked “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” and if you should happen to read Between Friends. a new collection of short stories by Israeli writer Amos Oz, the answer to that question is obvious.
They come from the fictional Kibbutz Yekhat.
Not since reading The Royal Game and Other Stories, a collection from the great Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, have I encountered a book that so compellingly probes the related issues of loneliness, alienation and shyness.
Oz’s eight stories, translated into English by Sondra Silverston, are all set during the 1950s when the kibbutz movement was in full socialistic flower. In that decade after Israel’s War of Independence, the kibbutzim were intent on building a new society in which a person’s hard work was supposed to be the standard by which he or she were judged.
Karl Marx’s formulation “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” was a guiding principle. From infancy, children were raised together in dormitories rather than at home with their parents. The elected kibbutz committee allocated resources — which included not only money and living quarters but also members’ time, their travel destinations, even what subjects students should take in college for the betterment of the kibbutz. So much togetherness. And yet, there were all the lonely people, people such as —
— Zvi Provizor, a bachelor, who never fails to share the latest bad news that he heard on the radio, and, if he ever hears good news, he keep it to himself. If people try to get close, he pushes them away.
— Ariella Barash, who now has Boaz –husband of the serene Osnat–in her bed permanently, yet realizes it was not him that she really had wanted.
–Nahum Asherov, the widower, who agonizes over what he should say after oft-married kibbutz teacher and philosopher David Dagan seduces Asherov’s 17-year-old daughter and has her move in with him.
–Moshe Yashar, a 16-year-old boy adopted by the kibbutz, who loyally travels off the kibbutz to visit his mentally incompetent biological father.
–Roni Shindlin, the kibbutz’s wit and gossip, whose whimpering 5-year-old son, Oded, is constantly bullied by the boys and girls who live with him in the children’s dormitory.
–Yoav Carni, the honorable kibbutz secretary, who while walking overnight guard duty, finds waiting for him a woman about whom he had always fantasized from afar, but who now is another man’s wife.
–Yotam Kalisch, who finds himself the object of controversy after his uncle Arthur invites him to come to Italy to study mechanical engineering. Arthur had angered the kibbutz years before when he upped and left.
–Martin Vandenberg, an emphysema victim who continues to smoke despite his need to regularly inhale the oxygen from a device he pulls after him. He believes if everyone were to learn Esperanto and be able to communicate in the same language, the world’s problems would be solved.
Each of these characters is the subject of a short story. Some of them appear in more than one episode, enabling Oz to paint a composite word portrait of the fictional kibbutz. Why didn’t the kibbutz movement live up to its ideals? Because lonely men and women can’t live by ideals alone.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World . He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com