SOURCE: Cohen, Joseph. “Amos Oz.” In Voices of Israel: Essays on and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz, pp. 141-91. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Cohen asserts that Oz makes use of “exotic realism” in his fiction, whereby he has “infused the reality of localized Israeli life with the exoticism of Romantic literature.”

Among those Israeli writers to emerge in the post-Palmah New Wave generation, Amos Oz appears to have been peculiarly blessed. As the interview with him makes clear, he came from a family of intellectuals on his father's side, and in his mother's family there were poets. Bred to city life in Jerusalem, he joined Kibbutz Hulda, located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem when he was fifteen years old, giving him the experience of communal socialist life. For three years, he was...