Amos and Sons

Amos Oz, the Israeli writer, novelist and journalist who won numerous awards for his books which were translated into some 45 languages, died on December 28. In the last years of his life, he formed an unexpected friendship with a Chabad rabbi. Four years ago, Amos Oz struck up an unlikely friendship with the Chabad representative to Rivne (Rovno), Ukraine. Oz’s mother, Fania Mussman, was from the-then Polish city of Rovno, and the home that she had grown up in, described in Oz’s best selling autobiographical novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness, had since become a tourist destination for Israeli fans and readers. Now the Rivne municipality wanted to commemorate the Mussman family home.Local authorities asked Rivne’s Chabad rabbi to collaborate with Oz’s children on the text for the plaque that would be affixed to the landmark home. The author’s daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger arrived from Israel to participate in the ceremony as her father followed the unveiling from Israel. Soon Oz would invite the Chabad representative, himself an Israeli, to visit him in his Tel Aviv home, and despite their starkly antithetical orientations, a friendship of substance developed across visits and weekly conversations in their native Hebrew. It just so happens that Rivne’s Chabad representative is named Shneur Zalman Schneerson, an intriguing curiosity for Amos Oz, whose second-grade teacher, one of Israel’s national poets and a first cousin of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, was Zelda Schneerson. “We called her ‘Teacher Zelda’ and she was my first love,” Oz wrote in a WhatsApp message to the Chabad rabbi. “I was a seven-year-old and she was a woman of 30 or so, but this love has illuminated my life to this very day.”Lubavitch.com reached Rivne’s Chabad representative in Israel, where he was paying a shiva call to the Oz family. Over the four years of their friendship, the author had taken a keen interest in Schneerson’s work to rebuild Jewish l...