At the age of 14, two years after his mother committed suicide, Amos Oz (né Klausner) joined the Labor Zionist movement, and left home for Kibbutz Hulda. The famed Israeli writer’s new book, Between Friends (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), comprises eight stories, with each focusing on an individual member of the fictional Kibbutz Yekhat, in the late 1950s. For example, there’s the gardener, Zvi Provisor, “a short fifty-five-year-old bachelor who had a habit of blinking.” Provisor “loved to transmit bad news”; and he shows up in another story: “Did you hear, Yoav? Minnesota is having its worst snowstorm in forty years. Eighteen dead and ten missing so far.” You’ll be happy to spend some time with these kibbutzniks brought to the page by a master storyteller. — M.S.
(American Jewish World, 3.14.14)
