Volume 35, Number 13 · August 18, 1988
The Promised Land
By Gabriele Annan
Confessions of a Good Arab
by Yoram Kaniuk, translated by Dalya Bilu
Braziller, 215 pp., $17.50
Black Box
by Amos Oz, translated, in collaboration with the author, by Nicholas De Lange
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 259 pp., $19.95
Twilight
by Elie Wiesel, translated by Marion Wiesel
Summit, 217 pp., $17.95
Black Box and Confessions of a Good Arab, by Israeli authors, are both state-of-the-nation novels disguised as love stories. The state of the nation, they tell us, is bad and sad. Oz's principal female character Ilana loves the Zionist songs she learned when she arrived from Poland as a child. Now it grieves her to hear them: 'There is a land but we have not found it. Some jester in disguise has crept in and seduced us into loathing what we have found. Destroying what was precious and will not return.' Her mournful mood is shared to varying degrees by everyone in Kaniuk's Confessions of a Good Arab. Even the old terrorist Bunim, now a Mossad officer, cannot adapt to the new irrationalism of the fundamentalists. The narrator's German-Jewish grandfather, Franz Rosenzweig, a world-famous surgeon and high-minded old-fashioned liberal, sees
Review, 3085 words
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