Space, Memory and Form in Oz and Matalon’s Autobiographical writing

• In Event: New Perspectives on Selfhood in Modern Hebrew Literature

Abstract

This talk discusses the autobiographical writing of Amos Oz and Ronit Matalon, focusing on their most acclaimed novels, Oz's 'A Tale of Love and Darkness' (2002) and Matalon's 'The Sound of Our Steps' (2008). Following the stream of autobiographical writing in Israeli literature in the last two decades, which distances the stories from the national narrative and chooses to produce marginal subjects, I investigate different poetic threads and surprising similarities between these two novels. While the novels differ in aspects such as the time of the narrative, languages and ethnicity background, and the gender of the narrator, several spatial concepts such as home, garden, the concepts of Diaspora and Homeland, as well as concrete and imagined places, and their complex meaning in the texts, enable comparative reading. The shared structural elements of the texts, such as the break in the linear narrative in favor of fragmented texts, bring to the fore the need for rephrasing the concepts of personal life stories and their ideological role in Israeli society.

Author

• Adia Mendelson Maoz, The Open University of Israel