Among friends (stories)

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Among friends (Hebrew original title: בין חברים) is a collection of short stories by the Israeli writer Amos Oz , which was published in 2012. In loosely linked stories, Oz tells of the inhabitants of a fictional Israeli kibbutz . The German translation by Mirjam Pressler was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2013 .

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Palm-lined path in Kibbutz Chulda, where Amos Oz lived for many years

The King of Norway : Zvi Provisor is the single gardener of Kibbutz Jikhat. His passion is bad news from world history, which he spreads in the kibbutz, so that behind his back he is called the "angel of death". At one point another person comes close to him, the widow Luna Blank, who is touched by his sensitivity to other people's suffering, but Zvi cannot bear her touch and rejects her. Luna leaves the kibbutz and moves to America. Zvi stays behind, waters her flowers and announces the death of the Norwegian king from cancer.

Two women : from one day to the next, the plumber Boas leaves his wife Osnat to live with the divorced Ariela Barasch. Osnat accepts the separation and gives her successor a short note with advice on her husband's diet. But when Ariela pours out her heart in a long letter, confesses her reluctant feelings towards Boaz and encourages friendship, she does not answer the other woman.

Among friends : The electrician Nachum Ascharow suffers from the fact that his daughter Edna, at the age of just seventeen, starts a relationship with the much older teacher David Dagan, which is a topic of conversation throughout the kibbutz. But when Nachum wants to intervene, he realizes that he is too weak to be able to counter Edna's love and David's authority.

Father : The sixteen-year-old Moshe Jaschar was sent to the kibbutz by the ministry after the death of his uncle. He feels strange among the other students, especially their natural way of dealing with girls is alien to the shy boy. He regularly leaves the kibbutz to visit his demented father in the hospital, who hardly recognizes him anymore. Coming home to the kibbutz is difficult for him.

A little boy : Roni Schindlin, a scornful mocker of everything and everyone, becomes soft when it comes to his five-year-old son Juval. Secretly and against the strict educational maxims of the kibbutz, he spoils the boy who has to sleep in the children's house, where he is harassed every night. In the absence of his wife Lea, Roni breaks the collar and avenges his son by beating another child. Father and son spend a night together against all the rules. But when Lea returns home, she sends the boy back to the children's home, and Roni complies with her as he always complies.

During the night : Joav Karni, the secretary of the kibbutz, is assigned to watch over the night. On his patrol he meets Nina Sirota, who cannot stand it with her husband Avner, and places her overnight in the secretary's office. When they are observed by the Zippora night watch, the secretary is immediately blamed for an affair. In fact, Joav had been in love with Nina as a schoolboy, and he fought for a long time against his desire to visit her again that night.

Deir Adschlun : The young Jotam Kalisch can no longer stand it in the kibbutz. Indefinite longings, which come over him especially in the ruins of the abandoned village of Deir Adschlun, drive him out into the world. A favorable opportunity arises when his uncle Arthur tries to finance a degree in mechanical engineering in Milan. But the community in the kibbutz has never forgiven the uncle for his apostasy and opposes any preferential treatment to an individual. Jotam debates whether he will have the courage to leave the kibbutz despite the rejection of his application.

Esperanto : Martin van den Bergh, the kibbutz's cobbler, is terminally ill. His neighbor Osnat takes care of him, while the kibbutz community encourages him to retire. But the idealistic Martin cannot imagine a life without work. In his last days he founded an Esperanto group in the kibbutz. With a common language, the native Dutchman hopes, all problems between people can be resolved. When he dies, his companions in the kibbutz give him last escort. Osnat is the last to stay at the grave and wishes she could speak a few Esperanto words to the dead man.

background

Amos Oz with the book edition of Unter Freunde at the Leipzig Book Fair 2013

In an interview, Amos Oz put it: “Over a hundred years ago, several thousand young Jews decided to emigrate from Eastern Europe […] and establish communes between the Jordan and the Mediterranean .” With great ambitions, they wanted to change politics, social classes and, ultimately, people. “Money was banned from the kibbutz […]. Everything was shared, all work should be of equal value. They wanted to work the land as brothers. But they failed because of the greatest utopia, the goal of turning people inside out. They failed because of human nature. ”The stories in Among Friends are set in the late 1950s, at a time when the kibbutz movement was established and at the same time the strict ideals of the early days were weakened for the first time.

Amos Oz himself lived in the kibbutz for many years. He grew up in the Kerem Avraham immigrant district of Jerusalem and left his family in 1954 at the age of 15 and moved to Kibbutz Chulda . Here he gave up his birth name “Klausner” and from then on called himself “Oz”, the Hebrew word for “strength” and “strength”. He returned there in 1963 after military service and studying in Jerusalem and did not leave the kibbutz until the mid-1980s to move to Arad . Looking back, he described: "I wanted to be like them, so as not to be like my father and not like my mother and not like all the bleak, learned refugees who populated Jewish Jerusalem." In 1982, Oz first processed his kibbutz experiences in the novel Der perfect peace . To Among Friends , he explained: “I write about the outsiders, the lonely. Happiness doesn't need me to tell stories about it. "

In his autobiographical novel A Tale of Love and Darkness , Amos Oz described the short story collection Winesburg, Ohio by American writer Sherwood Anderson as his literary awakening: “a series of stories and episodes in which one develops from the other and which are mainly connected by it that they all play in one and the same remote, poor, godforsaken small town. ”He applied the same construction principle almost 100 years later in Unter Freunde . Amos Oz himself called the book a "novel in tales". Back in 2009, Oz had similarly designed a microcosm of Israeli society in Stories from Tel Ilan using loosely connected village stories. Catarina von Wedemeyer even attributes the change between main and secondary characters to Balzac .

reception

According to Felicitas von Lovenberg, Amos Oz tells in Among Friends "seemingly simple stories of seemingly simple people in seemingly simple language". But the “dignity and simplicity of great art” emerges. Meike Feßmann discovers in the stories with "love, death, desire, decency, kindness, longing, loneliness" central themes of human life, which Oz treats with an "almost old-fashioned reserve". The volume is "a great work, calm, persistent, powerful, moving". Jochanan Shelliem judges: "With this chamber play full of grief, loss and death, Amos Oz has succeeded in creating a masterpiece whose brevity takes your breath away and whose suppressed dreams make you sad." beautiful."

For Catarina von Wedemeyer, Oz tells “nothing and everything” about people who all almost touch each other. The author wanted "neither to settle accounts with kibbutz life nor to glorify it nostalgically". Rather, according to Hans-Dieter Fronz, the kibbutz serves as a “mirror of society” and a “stage for the human-all-too-human”. And he judges: "You have to look for an author in contemporary literature who is able to present living figures with the same mastery in just a few strokes." "Renunciation, desire, love, loneliness and pain" is what Carsten Hueck names the themes of the stories, which could be found anywhere, but which in Oz's fictional kibbutz are "visible as if under a magnifying glass". The book also runs through “the grief over an abandoned utopia, the age-wise insight into the conditioning of people”.

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jochanan Shelliem: Failed utopia . On NDR Kultur on March 22, 2013.
  2. ↑ a b Meike Feßmann : The Sephardic and the little dog . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of May 6, 2013.
  3. ↑ a b c Felicitas von Lovenberg : Love your neighbor if he lets you . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 6, 2013.
  4. ↑ a b Martin Oehlen: "Among friends" by Amos Oz . In: Kölner Stadtanzeiger from March 4, 2013.
  5. ↑ Inge Günther: Oz: "There is still a powerful 'kibbutz gene'" . Interview with Amos Oz. On: Deutsche Welle, March 20, 2013.
  6. ↑ Amos Oz: Of Desert and Hope ( Memento of the original from April 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . On arte .
  7. ↑ a b Catarina von Wedemeyer: The mother of all sins . In: the daily newspaper of April 21, 2013.
  8. ↑ Janina Fleischer: New book by Amos Oz: In “Among friends” he tells stories from the kibbutz . In: Leipziger Volkszeitung from March 11, 2013.
  9. ↑ Hans-Dieter Fronz: Amos Oz ' volume of short stories "Among friends" . In: Badische Zeitung of June 22, 2013.
  10. ↑ Carsten Hueck: Under the burning glass of emotions . On: Deutschlandradio Kultur from April 19, 2013.