A Tale of Love and Darkness

Oz's memoir maps a bookish, threadbare childhood in late-Mandate Jerusalem: a cramped basement flat in Kerem Avraham, the reading rooms of the National Library and the university on Mount Scopus, and the night the streets filled to celebrate the United Nations vote for partition. The map runs from the poor prophet-named streets of the north out east to the campus on the ridge and down into the heart of downtown.

Amos

The family's basement flat, Amos Street

Kerem Avraham

The centre of the book is a small, damp, book-lined flat on the ground floor of a building in Kerem Avraham, a poor neighbourhood in the north of the city whose streets carry the names of Hebrew prophets. The boy grows up here among his parents' languages, arguments and unspoken griefs, with the wider world reaching him mostly through books.

The Kerem Avraham childhood

inferred Kerem Avraham and Amos Street are real and named, but the memoir does not turn the flat into a museum address, so this marks a representative point on Amos Street in the neighbourhood where the family lived.

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