hay_jude's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
I found this book on the shelf, -I think it was my mum's as I remember her liking Oz as an author - and took it to read on a long plane journey. The first of the two longish short stories in it was about a crusade which interested me as I'd read about them in my history degree. The other story is more modern, seemingly contemporaneous with when the book was published in the mid- nineteen seventies, between the 6 Day and Yom Kippur wars. Both in different ways are about anti-semitism. In the first, the French noble leading the crusade seeks to kill all the Jews they encounter but gradually becomes more and more paranoid as time goes on, convincing himself that there must be a Jew hidden amongst his retinue who is bringing bad luck to the crusade.In the other an elderly Israeli academic has a conspiracy theory that Russia is seeking to exterminate all remaining Jews, about which he seeks to warn others but largely encounters indifference. I found the book quite hard going. Both of the stories are imbued with a sense of doom and I wondered if this reflected the time the stories were written, when Israel was under threat from its neighbours and the future seemed uncertain. The shadow of the holocaust definitely looms over the stories, which of course was fresher in the memory at the time they were written. I know Oz, who was born in Israel in 1939, came to be on the left in Israeli politics, eventually advocating the 2 state solution as a way of holding the peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I wasn't really clear of the message Oz was seeking to convey here.
manvelhdz's review against another edition
4.0
Dos historias que se desarrollan en diferentes épocas y lugares pero que dan a conocer rasgos de la cultura judía, el odio y la persecusión que han sufrido históricamente.
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