About
In Between Friends, Amos Oz returns to the kibbutz of the late 1950s, the time and place where his writing began. These eight interconnected stories, set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yekhat, draw masterly profiles of idealistic men and women enduring personal hardships in the shadow of one of the greatest collective dreams of the twentieth century. A devoted father who fails to challenge his daughter's lover, an old friend, a man his own age; an elderly gardener who carries on his shoulders the sorrows of the world; a woman writing perversely poignant letters to her husband's mistress. Each of these stories is a luminous human and literary study; together they offer an eloquent portrait of an idea, and of a charged and fascinating epoch. Amos Oz at home. And at his best.
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Reviews
"[An] intricately interwoven skein of eight new stories . . . 'Between Friends' richly satisfies . . . One savors these moody miniatures of the kibbutz past (gracefully translated by Sondra Silverston) for their jazzlike variations; each elegantly underscores the uncertain fates awaiting both the lonely individual and the community."
Forward
"Oz traces the emotional terrain of kibbutz life in this . . . gorgeous, rueful collection of eight linked stories about life in fictional Kibbutz Yekhat . . . Written in deliberately unadorned prose (beautifully translated by Sondra Silverston), [Between Friends] lays bare the deepest human longings."
Chicago Tribune
"The mind is a place Oz explores masterfully in all its contradiction, texture and heartache. Between Friends paints the daily lives behind utopian dreams, fully realized."
New York Daily News