Amos Oz, a leading sabra writer of Israel's second generation, is less concerned than his elders with optimistically depicting Israel's Zionist destiny in an esthetic of socialist realism and more concerned with scrupulously capturing the existential angst of individuals of the kibbutz in a tone of tragic irony that sometimes approaches the absurd….

The "jackals" motif, found everywhere [in Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories], becomes a central symbol that sustains the intense climate of siege and danger. The kibbutz … represents Israel in miniature; the hungry jackals lurking outside the compound are the ever-threatening Arabs. Inside the kibbutz, human passions, symbolized by the khamsin—the fiercely hot desert wind—are usually on the verge of explosion in these tense dramas that occur there among the youth and the aging, driven by loneliness, their fantasies and their clashing ideas and temperaments….

Oz's intense and poetic descriptions, which powerfully...