Amos Oz — author with roots in the Russian Empire
Amos Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem, then in Mandatory Palestine, on 4 May 1939, the only child of Yehuda Arieh Klausner and Fania Klausner, née Mussman. Both his parents were born in the Russian Empire, and he grew up in a household whose books, languages and memories came from it.
His father was born in Odessa in 1910; Oz told the Paris Review that his father came from Odessa and had moved to Vilnius, then part of Poland, while Wikipedia describes the paternal family as from Lithuania, where they had farmed near Vilnius. His grandfather Aleksander Klausner, born in Odessa, wrote poetry in Russian all his life, and the scholar Joseph Klausner was his father's uncle. Yehuda Arieh studied history and literature in Vilnius and in 1933 emigrated to Palestine, where he worked as a librarian and writer; he read, by his son's account, sixteen languages. His mother was born in 1913 in Rovno, then in the Volhynia Governorate of the Russian Empire and later in Poland, the daughter of a miller; she studied briefly in Prague and came to Palestine in the 1930s, where she met Yehuda Arieh as a fellow student at the Hebrew University. The family lived in the Kerem Avraham neighbourhood of Jerusalem.
His mother died in January 1952, when he was twelve. At fourteen or fifteen he left home for Kibbutz Hulda and took the Hebrew surname Oz. The kibbutz sent him to the Hebrew University, where he graduated in literature and philosophy in 1963, and he taught at schools near Hulda until 1986, when he moved to Arad and later taught at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
His novel My Michael (1968) was his first best-seller, and over five decades he published novels, stories and essays translated into dozens of languages. A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), his memoir of his family and of his mother's life and death, was acclaimed internationally, sold more than a million copies and was filmed by Natalie Portman. With his daughter, the historian Fania Oz-Salzberger, he wrote Jews and Words (2012). His many honours included the Goethe Prize.
He died in Petah Tikva on 28 December 2018, aged seventy-nine, and was buried at Kibbutz Hulda.
"His father, born in Odessa in 1910, grew up and studied in Vilnius and emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933; his mother, born in Rovno in 1913, studied briefly in Prague and reached Palestine in the mid-1930s."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa (father) and Rovno, Volhynia Governorate (mother) (now Ukraine)
His father, Yehuda Arieh Klausner, was born in Odessa in 1910 and his mother, Fania Mussman, in Rovno in 1913, both then in the Russian Empire; they met as students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where Amos was born in 1939.
His family fled the Russian Empire/Poland (Klausner family).
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Odessa (father) and Rovno, Volhynia Governorate (mother) (now Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"My books are written in Hebrew, but their deepest roots are in the Jewish streets of Odessa and Rovno."