Amos Oz returns to his roots: the kib­butz of Israel’s sec­ond decade. It was a time when Israel strug­gled to build a state and to merge social­ist ideals with the real­i­ties of dai­ly liv­ing with real peo­ple; the Jew­ish nature of the Jew­ish state and the chal­lenges of bor­ders and pop­u­la­tions lie decades in the future. Oz presents us with eight short sto­ries — any one of which could stand alone — which are intri­cate­ly interconnected.

Oz intro­duces us to Yoav Carni, who had been the kibbutz’s first baby and grew up to become the first sec­re­tary of the kib­butz to have been born there. Like every mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty, he takes a turn serv­ing guard duty at night. Oz describes how he enjoys the peace­ful­ness of that role in con­trast with the pol­i­tics of his day job. He encoun­ters a woman who is leav­ing her hus­band in the mid­dle of the night, and their inter­ac­tion goes beyond the sim­ple solv­ing of a fam­i­ly prob­lem, paint­ing broad-stroke images of the life of the com­mu­ni­ty and its strug­gles through the lens of two people.

We see the life of indi­vid­ual kib­butznikim, their joys and sor­rows, their tri­umphs and fail­ures. We feel the pain of a father who leaves things unsaid and the frus­tra­tion of a utopi­an ide­al­ist who wants to teach every­one to speak Esperan­to. Togeth­er they become inter­wo­ven strands of a tapes­try that beau­ti­ful­ly por­trays a snap­shot of a fas­ci­nat­ing peri­od in our people’s his­to­ry. This may not be the most impor­tant book Amos Oz has writ­ten, but it is among the rich­est in terms of char­ac­ter and imagery, and one of the most enjoyable.