This was one
of my favorite books of this Contemporary World Literature Class. I grew up
being gently forced to read biographies by my mother, who used to choose one
mandatory book for us from the library in addition to many books of our
choosing. She always chose helpful, boring books like biographies. I appreciate
it now for being non-fiction and expanding my tastes in elementary school, but
at the time those books were dry and pale in comparison to the colorful Boxcar Children and Goosebumps and Little House on
the Prairie stories. I rarely read biographies after elementary. I was
apprehensive about the memoirs and autobiographies in this class but was
pleasantly surprised by all of them. I particularly enjoyed reading Istanbul: Memories and the City for its
historical richness and overwhelmingly detailed analysis of one's childhood.
The blatantly honest switches between city and self was a different way of
autobiography that Pamuk accomplished very well. For that reason, I also
enjoyed A Tale of Love and Darkness by
Amos Oz. Again, a complicated and rich history of a city against the backdrop
of a personal (Pamuk's) story (or the city a backdrop for his childhood).
Oz deals
with gender roles and expectations as he did in My
Michael in the character of Hannah. He recalls his aunt's saying that
she cannot be sure of what to think of the current culture as she may have been
"brainwashed, like all the girls in [her] generation" (180). Chastity
could disappear with any slight misstep and "women are entitled to an
education and a place outside the home - but only until the children are
born" (178). It was interesting to note similar gender restraints in
Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mom,
in which Mom pushes her children (even including the daughters) to pursue
education and sacrifices her own comfort, as she did not receive education as a
young girl.
As I've
mentioned before in the final exam presentation, one reason why I resonated
with Oz's memoir is his accurate retelling of the tension he experienced as an
aspiring thinker/writer: the balance between the rational and irrational;
secular and spiritual;' reality and ideals. He talks about his admiration for
Jules Verne's Michael Strogroff who wins
the battle for his country with tears of pure passion and emotion, not
masculine stoicism and intellectual musings: "And now here was Michael
Strogoff, a flawless hero, a man of iron who could endure any hardship or
torture, and yet when he suddenly thinks of love, he shows no restraint: he
weeps...not weep from fear, or from pain, but because of the intensity of his
feelings" (457-8). Oz is cultured to think with the "pioneering ethos
of Zionism that [he] received from [his] father: secular, enlightened,
rationalistic, idealistic, militantly optimistic and progressive" yet his
heart strains for the "miracle-laden logic", charm, mystery, and
grace of his mother's stories (459). He is caught up with dichotomous thinking
as he is caught up in the middle of his parents' relationship as a young child.
Strogoff's choice to bare his soul (femininity) instead of fighting back to
defeat his enemies shows that there is a way to reconcile the seemingly
contradictory mechanisms: "And so this manliest of men defeats all his
foes thanks for his 'feminine side'...without impairing or weakening his
'masculine side'...on the contrary, it complemented it and made peace with
it" (458). Likewise, there is hope for Oz to bring together his parents'
mismatched lives (he likes to think they are living together in "perfect
harmony" in the after life) as there is much reason to shy away from hard
dichotomous thinking towards a holistic and personal integration (461).
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