At first glance, the story seems simple enough: a veteran civil planner, Theo, and his lover Noa live in the small Israeli desert town of Tel Kedar. A student has died of drug-related causes, and his father asks Noa, a schoolteacher, to help set up a drug rehabilitation center. That's all that happens. Yet, the strength, passion, and beauty of Amos Oz's writing transforms his examination of these characters.
Certainly, the main theme coursing through the novel is the relationship between Noa and Theo. When the book opens, she is 45, he is 60. She is wrapped up in her task of establishing the drug rehab center in memory of Emanuel Orvieto. He wishes to slow down, take life easy. Yet we learn that she was attracted to him when he was a troubleshooting planner in South America and she was there as a teacher.
We see the transformation of Theo in Noa's eyes, from the dashing older lover who has so much to teach her about so many things, to the sometimes tiresome, nagging, interfering older man in her life. The true brilliance of the book is Oz's ability to portray both the conflicts and the comings together of this couple in a way that is natural, unforced, and very real.
In many ways, Don't Call It Night is reminiscent of the style of Israel's Nobel laureate, S.Y. Agnon, in his classic novel, A Guest for the Night: marked by very little action but rather by deep psychological descriptions of both the story's characters and actions. With its interesting cast of characters, Tel Kedar often appears more like an Eastern European shtetl than a modern Israeli town. Even a description of Noa watching Theo at work repairing an old typewriter contributes to this impression. "For an instant, he looked to me like a patient Jewish watchmaker from an earlier generation. His slightly cocked head, his partly closed eye that looked larger through the lens of my glasses . . . I stood quietly behind his back, barefoot, for a few minutes, fascinated by the skill of his fingers, as if generations of fiddlers and scribes had a share in it."
Another of the book's themes is the inadequacy of words. Once Noa asked Emanuel Orvieto why he never put his hand up in class, why he never said anything. "Again, he had to pause before he answered, hesitantly, that he found words a trap . . . Whatever the poet did or didn't want to say gets in the way of the poem." Another insight on words: "One evening he said, 'Poetry is a kind of spark trapped in a piece of glass, because words are pieces of glass.' " Then, this description of the desert which surrounds Tel Kedar: "To be at peace means to be as much like the mountains as possible: silent and present. Vacant."
Don't hurry through Don't Call It Night. Savor it, and its bouquet will return to you frequently with memorable scenes and insight.
Stephen Fuchs is the rabbi at The Temple in Nashville.
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