A Bit of Oz

I'm nowhere near starting Infinite Jest as I'm only halfway through the puny-sized (a mere 538 pages) Tale of Love and Darkness, the autobiography of Amos Oz. [Guardian obit, Dec. 2018]

Oz weaves two stories together--the story of his mismatched parents, which is familiar (his mother committed suicide, like my mother), and the story of the Jewish people who moved to Palestine to found the nation of Israel, whose perspective I'd barely ever considered––and is not what I expected.

 Amos Oz (b. 1939, Jerusalem) with parents Fania and Yehuda Arye Klausner

Reading about the Jewish emigrants reminds me of reading the novel The Sorrow of War, by writer Bao Ninh, who had been a North Vietnamese soldier in the Vietnam War––because I'd never thought about their stories before. And yet, of course, they're human, so they are recognizable...

But I'd simply never considered, for instance, that women––girls––were NVA soldiers too.

Kien looked at her more closely. "How old are you?"

"Nearly twenty. I joined when I was eighteen," she said. "But I'm still not used to it."

"No one gets used to it," he said, grinding his cigarette into the ground.
_________________

"The only people we were not too afraid of were the Germans." 

The section of Love & Darkness where Amos Oz's aunt, his dead mother's sister, remembers growing up in eastern Europe in the 1920s has a surprising twist––not just politically, but experientially––church bells that I hear as beautiful and in some ways mine are "those scary bells of theirs". The history  is frighteningly familiar: 
in times of chaos people are attracted to strong leaders who impose order, thinking they will save them--the people sometimes even choose to elect these strongmen (Hitler, Pinochet...).

Oz's aunt tells him:

You who were born here in Israel can never understand how this constant drip-drip [of social humiliation] distorts all your feelings, how it corrodes your human dignity like rust. 
...
But most of all [we] dreaded the mobs. ..."They're sharpening their knives for us in the dark," people said, and they never said who, because it could be any of them. The mobs. Even here in Israel, it turns out, Jewish mobs can be a bit of a monster.
...
The only people we were not too afraid of were the Germans.
I can remember in 1934 or 1935––I'd stayed behind to finish my nursing training when the rest of the family had left [to Palestine]––there were quite a few Jews who said if only Hitler would come, at least in Germany there's law and order and everyone knows his place, it doesn't matter so much what Hitler says, what matters is over there in Germany he imposes German order and the mob is terrified of him.
What matters is that in Hitler's Germany there is no rioting in the streets and they don't have anarchy ––we still thought then that anarchy was the worst state.

Our nightmare was that one day the priests would start preaching that the blood of Jesus was flowing again, because of the Jews, and they would start to ring those scary bells of theirs and the peasants would hear and fill their bellies with schnapps and pick up their axes and pitchforks, that's the way it always began.
Nobody imagined what was really in store, but already in the 1920s almost everyone knew deep down that there was no future for the Jews... anywhere in Eastern Europe...

{end quote}

We are often afraid of the wrong things––or, rather (it's all dangerous), we think the wrong things will protect us.