Amos Oz was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem in 1939, under British rule, the only child of two book-loving immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, a scholar and librarian, hoped to become a great professor; his mother, Fania, was gentle, imaginative and deeply unhappy. When Amos was twelve, she took her own life.

Two years later, rebelling against his father’s world, Amos left home to live on Kibbutz Hulda, a farming community, and took a new surname, Oz, which means strength in Hebrew. He stayed at Hulda for more than thirty years, working in the fields, teaching, and marrying a kibbutz member. At first the kibbutz allowed him one day a week to write; as his books succeeded, it gave him more.

His early novels made him famous in Israel. My Michael (1968), told by a young wife in 1950s Jerusalem who is slowly sinking into fantasy and depression, became a bestseller and was translated around the world. He went on to write more than a dozen novels, and stories, essays and children’s books. His fiction is often about families and marriages, and about the strains of Israeli life, quietly observed.

His greatest book is a memoir. A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002) tells the story of his family, his childhood in a cramped Jerusalem apartment lined with books, the birth of the State of Israel, and, at last, his mother’s death, which he had been unable to write about for fifty years. It is funny, tender and devastating, and became one of the best-selling books in Israeli history.

Oz was also one of Israel’s leading public voices for peace. He was a founder of the Peace Now movement and argued for decades for two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side, a position that made him many enemies. His small book How to Cure a Fanatic gathers his thinking on the subject, with his belief that imagining yourself in other people’s lives, as novels ask us to do, is a kind of antidote to fanaticism. He died of cancer in Tel Aviv on December 28, 2018, at seventy-nine.