Amos Oz
(author)/ Nicholas de Lange (translator), Judas,
2016
There
are two stories here, both of them, timeless and tender. In the fringe of
Jerusalem in harsh winter, Shmuel lives a contented life, going about his graduate
studies at the University, political activism with like-minded friends and a
tender longing for the woman in his life. The quiet of his commonplace life is suddenly
disrupted and he is compelled to be the conversation companion to the aging and
argumentative Gershom Wald. In the closed confines of that mysterious house, he
meets the enigmatic Atalia. The avid Zionist in Wald and the mysterious Atalia
open to him a world of new possibilities.
Shmuel’s
enquiry into the character of Judas, the traitor of the son of God, ends in his
assessment that Judas may not be the renegade apostle, but an ardent believer whose
immutable faith leads to his own tragedy and his teacher’s. More than anyone,
Judas was awaiting the ultimate miracle from his master, the return from death,
even as Jesus questions himself relentlessly. It is with Jesus on the Cross,
irreversibly lost to the world, that Judas comes to terms with the complete
breakdown of his faith and the fatality of his persuasion. With the core of his
belief shaken, the only possible way out is death.
By
traversing with the beliefs of Judas, we are travelling through one of the most
sought after and abused road of treachery and betrayal that has simmered in
medieval Europe between Judaism and Christianity. What is the most inventive part
of the book is Shealtiel Abravanel, the only man who opposed the Zionist
project as the modern apostate equivalent of Judas. Traversing through the
veins of old Jerusalem of Jesus and Judas, Shmuel unwittingly also crosses the
dreams and destiny of the sparring friends Wald and Abravanel, insider and
outsider, believer and traitor, Zionist and apostate in a war of ideas about
truth, faith and mercy.
One of
the boldest novels from a perpetual favourite for the highest honour in
Literature, the Nobel Prize, Amos Oz does it again long after his magnum opus ‘A
Tale of Love and Darkness’ and does it with the panache of a master
storyteller. His is a vision that brings together the proximity of
diametrically opposite notions of trust and betrayal, love and hate, the safe
confines of lost inheritance to the words and ideas of our times. And in doing
so, how tender the strength of our views looks in the eyes of the other and how
the certainty of our justices shudders in the pain on the other side! Truth,
ever so fragmented, lies in so many voices on both sides of the transgression.
