What Makes an Apple? by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz [Oz, Amos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691219905
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2022-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

And you failed at that. Not at being suntanned or tall, I mean, but at not writing stories.

I did manage to get a little tanned in the end, but I utterly failed at being tall. And writing stories—that urge was stronger than I was. Stronger than the shame. I would go to the back room at night, the reading room in the cultural building, on the edge of the kibbutz. The other boys went to play basketball or hang out with girls. I didn’t stand a chance at basketball or girls, so I would sit there alone in that back room and write all sorts of poems. I was fifteen or sixteen and I was so ashamed. Just as I was ashamed of masturbating, I was ashamed of writing. What are you doing? What are you doing? Are you crazy? You just promised yourself you were done, that you’d never do it again, so what’s going on? Again? How long will this go on? But I couldn’t stop. In fact, there in that back room, I bid farewell to poetry writing and began to try my hand at prose. Sherwood Anderson freed my writing hand, but that’s something I wrote about, I think, in Love and Darkness.

When I was in the army I started publishing stories in Keshet, which was edited by Aharon Amir. I think I sent him one story and he rejected it. Then I sent him another one, and he sent me back a postcard with six words: “Well done, it’s gone to print.” Because of that postcard, I always call Aharon Amir—I did this when he was alive and I do it now, after his death—I always call him “my founder and first editor” (because in the newspaper Davar, up to its very last day of publication, it always said in the masthead: “Founder and first editor, Berl Katznelson”). Aharon Amir is my founder and first editor.

One of my first stories published in Keshet was “The Way of the Wind,” which is about a paratrooper who fell onto electrical wires. It was loosely based on a disaster that occurred on the fields of Hulda, during an Independence Day paratroopers’ demonstration jump. Maybe three or four years after that story was published, the Ministry of Education included it on the matriculation curriculum. I took my matriculation exams while I was doing my military service. If I’d taken my literature exam a few years later, I might have been tested on that story. I would probably have failed.

I wrote a story and then another one and then another. And I received two or three letters that slightly helped me overcome my fear of being worthless. Dahlia Ravikovitch, whom I did not know, wrote me a very Dahlia-ish letter, which was heartwarming, and it began with the words, “They say you are an extraordinarily young person.” Because of her poems and because of that letter, I fell in love with her a little, and that was before I even met her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.