Memory Writing And Identity Exploration In A Tale Of Love And Darkness

The Israeli writer Amos Oz(1939-2018.12)went to the literary world in the 1960s,and he was a representative person of the "New Wave Writer",and a tenured professor of the Hebrew literature department at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.A Tale of Love and Darkness is an autobiographical novel published by Oz in 2002,The novel was translated into more than twenty languages within five years,and was regarded by the academic community as the best work of Oz.The background of A Tale of Love and Darkness has been extended from Jerusalem in the 1940s governed by the United Kingdom,to Kibbutz in the early days of the founding of Israel in the 1950s,and to Europe in the late 19th and 1930s.Compared to the former novels of Oz,this novel's background setting is more grand,and no longer limited to Jerusalem and Kibbutz.This novel takes Oz as the prototype and starts the narrative from the first person perspective.The family narrative of the three generations of Klausner and Mussman is the main line.The back ground is the whole Jewish nation of the national narrative in the past 100 years.The content is complicated and deep in thought.It has accumulated Amos Oz's serious thinking on political history,national destiny,family,cultural heritage,and the fate of the victims.This thesis takes the diffuse memory,traumatic memory and cultural memory of the genius,father and son of the Klausner family as the research object,and focuses on the issue of identity of the three generations under the broad historical and cultural background.The full text is divided into three parts:introduction,body and conclusion.The introduction part includes a brief introduction to Amos Oz and his long autobiographical novel A Tale of Love and Darkness.It puts forward the research problem of the thesis,summarizes the domestic and foreign research status of A Tale of Love and Darkness and the Oz's novel creation,and clarifies the innovation?significance and methods of the thesis.The second part is the main part of the thesis,which is divided into three chapters.The first chapter explores the identity of the Krausner family's ancestor Alexander Kraussmann and his wife,Schromit Levin,from the perspective of the big scatter memory.At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century,Alexander and his wife Schmidt lived in Odessa,which was a cultural city belonging to Russia at that time.They were influenced by the strong European cultural atmosphere of the host country.Alexander and Schmidt,who had been baptized by European civilization,were enthusiastic Pro-European people.The one social thought that influenced the destiny of European Jews in the early 20th century was the anti-Semitism that had existed but intensified in the 1920s and 1930s.And the other one was the thought of Zionist trend,which was devoted to the Jewish national renaissance and encouraging Jews to immigrate to Palestine to establish a national homeland.Although the ancestors were supporters of the Zionist movement,but as Pro-European people,they did not want to leave Europe and be back to the poor and backward Palestine.Under the persecution of the anti-Semitism movement,the ancestors were forced to return to Palestine.The trauma of the anti-Semitic movement and the impact of the difficult living conditions of Palestinian changed the identity of the ancestors.Grandfather Alexander completed the transition from a Pro-European to a Zionist at the spiritual level.However,Grandma Schmidt went to a depression in the gap between the middle class and the refugee status.The second chapter studies the identity of the victims of Amos Oz's father,Aliye,and his mother,Fanny,from the perspective of traumatic memory.The persecution of anti-Semitism has caused tremendous trauma to Aliye in the process of his growing up,and further strengthened the identity of Aliye as a member of the Jewish nation as a"scapegoat".Zionism rejects the historical memory paradigm of great dispersal and its ethical concern for Oz forced the victim,Aliye,to bury this traumatic memory in his heart and become a claustrophobic wound.It has a profound impact on Fanny Mosman's identity.The traumatic memory mainly includes the psychological trauma in the ethical relationship between mother and daughter and the trauma caused by the anti-Semitism movement and the memory of death in the Arab-Israeli war.The role of Jewish woman also intensifies the damage caused by traumatic memory,and becomes the trigger of Fanny's suicide choice.The third chapter analyzes the changes of Amos Oz's identity at different stages from the perspective of individual memory.Influenced by the state's negation of the great dispersal,admiration the spirit of the pioneers,and construction the national memory of the image of "New Hebrews",Oz in childhood yearned to escape the influence of the old Jewish identity of the Klausner family,and went to the Kibbutz to live a pioneer life;mother's suicide and father's derailment and remarriage changed the original family ethics structure,and it forced Oz's identity from the "loved son" in the complete family to the "abandoned orphan" in the new family.In order to escape from this identity,Oz chose to betray his father to go to Kibbutz;the sorrow brought by the marginality of Kibbutz induced Oz to return to literary creation,inspired by "The Town of the Orphan",he completed the identity transition from the Pro-European to national Jewish,and ultimately finished the reconciliation with the family and nation in the identity of the Jewish writer.The third part is the conclusion part,summarizing the main points of the full text.The central stage in A Tale of Love and Darkness is occupied by a group of Eastern European Jews who move to Jerusalem during the third Alia.From Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,to the British mandate of Jerusalem,from Jerusalem during the first Arab Israeli war to kibbutz after the founding of the People's Republic,in the grand historical background,Amos Oz shows how the Jews of different generations of the two families constructed their own identity in the face of the great social trends of thought.And how to make difficult ethical choices in order to realize self-identity construction.On this level,A Tale of Love and Darkness is a history of the changing identities of Eastern European Jews and their first generations who were forced to return to Palestine in the 20th century by the antisemitism and the Zionism.