eBook The Hill of Evil Counsel (English and Hebrew Edition) download

Amos Oz is a great writer, and will probably be considered one of the best of the 21st century. There's always a good deal of himself in his novels, and this book is no exception. Oz came into life at the time of the end of the British Mandate, World War II, the shadow of the destruction befalling Jews of Europe hanging heavily over the population of what was then called Palestine-- their future seemed nearly as uncertain. The book, as Oz's novels often do, focuses on a lonely, rather odd child who moves into and out of the lives of several adults during this anxious, frightening time. There is no question that this is how Oz sees himself, as his autobiography attests. Despite the academic luster of his family (he was born Amos Klausner, great-nephew of the renowned scholar, writer, and political radical Joseph Klausner; Oz's father was also brilliant, but could never find a real place for himself in the Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s. His mother never adjusted to the harsh landscape and turbulent life of the Levant, instead pining for her native eastern Europe with its shaded forests, cool streams and a settled, predictable, cultured though minority existence. Of course that was being destroyed even while she yearned for it. She killed herself when Amos Oz was twelve years old. When he was 15, he left home, joined a kibbutz, and changed his name from Klausner to Oz, which means "strength" in Hebrew (it is pronounced with a long O). So all Oz's books about the Jerusalem of that era are filled with anxiety, with shadows and fears, and people wrenched from one way of life and forced into another, each with his or her unique tragedy. Yet there is humor too, even though some of it is dark. In this book, whose title is ana real place in Jerusalem where the New Testament figure Judas Iscariot is said to have betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, historical figures like Ben Gurion and Golda Meir flit in and out, so that the novel at times seems to be rather more than fiction. During his childhood Oz knew some of these people; they were visitors to his parents' apartment, or particularly his great-uncle's. The intelligentsia of Jerusalem was a small world within a larger but still diminutive world, and so the these people really did know each other on a very personal basis. The fight for a nation was replete with personal tragedy; the reader wonders at times how anyone survived it, let alone built a modern state out of what at the time seemed the epitome of hopelessness. It is the individual that Oz turns his light upon, not the nation; the embryonic state is a backdrop for the drama of individual lives, especially separated lives, people parted by the seeming randomness of chance and fate. The figure of Uri the boy, who has appeared in other books by Oz under various guises, is the one uniting force in the book. But we see only the reflection of Uri in this book not really Uri himself.

As to the historical figures who appear, sometimes in cameo, there was a real Sir Alan Cunningham, for example. While not as well known as Golda Meir and Ben Gurion, Cunningham was the last British high commissioner of Palestine during the Mandate period, which ended in November 1947. The book opens at this precise time, the end of one era, the beginning of another, far less promising at the time. Sir Alan is present at a gala put on by the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, guarded by soldiers armed with machine guns to protect against the still-active Underground, presumably the Irgun, which had carried out a savage fight against the British for some years. In this chapter the guests at the gala are both real and fictional, the fictional guests being types for people whom Oz as a child observed at close hand. The book in its first (of three chapters) section is almost a time capsule. Oz uses history and fiction together, blending them so skillfully that the reader at times assumes that all these people must be real, or they must all be fictive; and in any case, it doesn't matter. The story is so taut and so compelling, the characters so vivid, that fiction and reality become one and the same. If some of the characters aren't real, they certainly would have had real counterparts in Jerusalem at that time, like the real Hill of Evil Counsel in Jerusalem, said to be the place where Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus by selling his whereabouts for 30 silver coins, the site which is today the site of UN headquarters-- it used to be the site of Government House (British) under the Mandate. The mythic and the real are inseparable in this latest masterpiece by Amos Oz.
"At a nearby table sat the philosopher Martin Buber and the writer S.Y. Agnon [real people, obviously]. In the course of a disagreement, Agnon jokingly suggested that they consult the younger generation. Father [fiction] made some remark; it must have been perceptive and acute, because Buber and Agnon both smiled; they also addressed his companion gallantly. At the moment Father's blue eyes may perhaps have lit up behind his round spectacles, and his sadness may have shown around his mouth." The character of Father is fiction, but can there be any doubt that Oz is also writing about his own father? The future Jerusalem is a dream, in the book, the present city of the 1940s is a disaster, filled with lost souls, wraiths, refugees groping their way through history, as real as the flesh and blood people who appear.

Yes. Amos Oz captures Jerusalem during the time of the Mandate - just perfectly. As I read the stories I could picture in my mind the "Hill of Evil Counsel" - now U.N. Headquarters. Now that says something doesn't it.

one gets a clear feeling about the mood of the days before the 1948 war.However if you dont know the history of the conflict you may not follow it and not get it as meant.

The 3 stories are interwoven skillfully

once again we can experience the beautiful prose and deeply insightful characterizations of amos oz. i read everything he writes

This is a series of three stories, all of which share the same time period and location, Jerusalem just prior to the departure of the British in 1948. The characters all encompass the same sense of destiny, fear and the unknown surrounding the birth of the tiny new nation, Israel. The strange small,large boy, Uri, is encircled by a conflicting group of newly arrived immigrants and activists seeking to establish themselves in the forth-coming battle against the British and then the Arabs. This is a grandly-woven tapestry of intricate misfits, humor and history. In wonder, a non-Israeli asks, "How does she (Israel) do it?--How does this worn-out, barren old girl make them all fall madly in love with her? I was once in southern Persia: exactly the same miserable hills, dotted with gray rocks, with a few olive trees and pieces of old pottery. Nobody crossed half the world to conquer them." Told with affection, the question is the very essence of the book.

Amos Oz tells us 3 simple stories where there is a slight connection, a little boy. That in fact isn't the most important thing in all this. The fact that the first history tell us about the start of the life of a Jew family in Jerusalem in the 40s, the second the beginning of the first signs, very slight, of resistance to the English occupation and the third a story of a sick young man and the organization of the neighbors to the eminent put out of the British. The official life of Israel seems to be their as the little distraction like commercial on the TV but is that that flows all the stories on this three novels.

I greatly enjoyed these recollections of a very tense time in Israel's history (the end of the British occupation), mixing nostalgia with tension and compassion for those trying to live and make a difference in the 1930s and 1940s in Jerusalem. At the same time, I noticed a lot of recycling of stock characters: stolid, intellectual men, flirtatious women, muddled religious mystics, etc. Still, the richness with which the period is reproduced makes this well worth a careful read.