SOURCE: Holtzman, Avner. “Strange Fire and Secret Thunder: Between Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Amos Oz.” Prooftexts 15, no. 2 (May 1995): 145-62.

In the following essay, Holtzman traces the influence of the writer Micha Josef Berdyczewski on the fiction of Oz through an analysis of “Strange Fire” and Berdyczewski's “Secret Thunder.”

Speaking of the impact of Micha Josef Berdyczewski's literary work on later Hebrew writers, many critics have referred to Amos Oz, who is considered the most prominent heir to the “Berdyczewski style” in Israeli literature. However, no systematic attempt has ever been made to define the nature of the linkage between these two writers. The following discussion aims to expose some of the similar aspects in the poetics of Oz and Berdyczewski. It will focus on the comparison between two stories, Berdyczewski's “Beseter ra‘am” (In Secret Thunder, 1920), and Oz's “Esh zarah” (“Strange Fire,” 1963). The detailed analysis of these stories...