Don’t Call It Night     by Amos Oz, Translated by N de Lange Original title: Al Tagidi Laila Original language: Hebrew Country: Israel   Published by Harvest Books Pub. Date: October 1998 Format: Paperback, 208 pages Dimensions: 0.54 x 7.92 x 5.33 in. ISBN: 0156005573 List Price: $11.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $8.80 Publisher Unknown List Price: £14.99 Not available for ordering

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This recent novel by Oz focuses on a small new town in Israel built on the very edge of the Negev desert, near to where Oz himself lives, and on the life of a couple there. They are Noa, a Hebrew literature teacher at the local school, who has just launched an absorbing new project to set up a drug rehabilitation centre, as a consequence of the mysterious death of one of her pupils, and her partner Theo, fifteen years her senior and in his sixties, who has more or less abandoned his brilliant town planning business and seems to eye with mute negativity the sudden energy which his partner is finding.

This is the basis for a vivid and humorous analysis of the couple, set against the patterns of the life and crazy characters of this small, far-flung town, the melting-pot world of ’New Israelis’. While the busy little town and the awesome desert are important figures in this work (evoking the history of Israel from early Pioneers to modern town-dwellers, a history which both Theo the town planner and Noa the Hebrew literature teacher represent and contribute to) it is the manoeuvres of Noa to assert herself which take the foreground in this book. Noa’s thoughts and feelings and above all the pace of her life are portrayed with great perceptiveness as she battles energetically against her sense of inferiority with respect to Theo (whom others call a ’national treasure’); and as her thoughts are increasingly occupied by the strange young boy who died striving for words (he had written good literature essays) and for life, as Noa herself is now doing, challenging her relationship with Theo, bidding for a new start.

This is a beautifully told tale, intertwining the perspectives of fiery Noa and controlled Theo, sometimes on the very same event, so that the differences between the two are shown up, often quite hilariously. Oz also conveys the wealth of perception, feeling and calculation which familiar activities can contain. For example, there is a risible shopping episode when from Theo’s slightly cautious opinion on a dress — we can never be sure just how undermining he is being — Noa infers that he does not support her drug clinic project, and, forgetting that she used the word first, accuses him of discouraging her in her ideas by describing the dress as ’folksy’. The writing moves so smoothly from such finely observed sparking to the arguments of the two stylists in the Champs-Elysées Hairdressing Salon or to the bad jokes of compulsive womaniser Muki, that these perceptions are woven into a picture of the society at large.

Despite the trip-wires which this couple, who know each other so very well, set for each other, the book also celebrates the moments of tenderness which suddenly spring between the pair when free of irritation and suspicion. Unlike the earlier My Michael (also reviewed here), it is not bleak but a warm and witty vision of old love, like the desert ancient, yet still edgy, potentially destructive but also with a beauty all its own.

’At the Entebbe falafel stand a Bedouin in his fifties is buying shawarma in pitta. The shawarma is a new venture, and Avram is happily explaining to the Bedouin that it’s still running in. If it goes well, in a couple of weeks’ time we’ll try grilled shish kebab. Meanwhile a haughty white cat with tail erect prances past Kushner’s bitch who had a litter of pups a couple of days ago. The bitch chooses to feign sleep, but opens one eye a slit to observe the extent of the insolence. Cat and bitch alike behave as though the whole situation were beneath their dignity.

At a quarter past eleven a small funeral cortège passes by the lights, only a handful of mourners, mainly elderly Ashkenazim. From his invariable stool in the doorway of Bozo Shoes, Pini Bozo asks who has died and how, and Kushner the bookbinder replies that it is old Elijah, Schatzberg the chemist’s senile uncle, the doting old fool who kept escaping and sitting in the post office all day long; every five minutes he used to join the queue and when he got to the counter he’d ask, When’s Elijah coming, and however often they chased him away he always came back.

The cortège is in a hurry. The pallbearers are almost running because the Sabbath is approaching and they still have a lot of preparations to take care of before sunset. With all the commotion the corpse, covered in a yellowing tallit, looks as though it is writhing in agony. A fair-haired, sparsely bearded religious youth hurries at the head, rattling a tin can and promising that almsgiving saves you from death. Theo reflects for a moment and concludes that it is a moot point.’ p58-9