[Oz's novels and novellas] are studded with interesting details about Jewish life in general and Israeli immigrant life in particular, but they share a peculiar emotional flatness and shed a curiously dim light on lives that on the surface are all excitement…. "The Hill of Evil Counsel,"… a collection of three long stories with interwoven themes and characters, is of a piece with the rest of his work, though the last story, "Longing," gets a bit deeper, below the skin of the main character than the others do.

All three stories take place during the last days of the British Mandate, in a ragged, sun-bleached, lower-middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem. In the first (and title) story, it is May, 1946. The full-scale war that will erupt two years later is a shadowy threat that the neighborhood's mostly Polish and Russian immigrants (who want at all costs to...