[Amos Oz] can write with delicate realism about small lives, or tell fables about large issues, but his writing, even in translation, gains vitality simply from his subject matter.

The Hill of Evil Counsel contains three long tales about the last two years of the British Mandate in Palestine, the uncertain, shifting, hopeful, terror-ridden years before the war, and the declaration of the independent Jewish State…. If Israel is to become both rubble and flowering desert, the fate of Jerusalem is even more problematic: Amos Oz shows us this only obliquely through the histories, hopes, extravagant dreams and anxieties of his families….

Amos Oz's translator, Nicholas de Lange, works closely with him, and it is possible, even in translation to gauge how the shifting style betrays the shifting composition of the thoughts, fears, weak and powerful hopes of the isolated people in Jerusalem. The language shifts from Old...