Kay’s Book Club

JUDAS By Amos Oz
Translated by Nicholas de Lange
305 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Review by Emily Barton

In a 2005 interview, George Saunders remarked that “all moral concerns in fiction reduce to technical concerns.” He argued for specificity over vagueness — for its ability to make us feel compassion, and for thoughtful fiction’s ability to frame a complex political argument through aesthetic means.

The Israeli author Amos Oz has been publishing fiction and nonfiction since the 1960s. Outspoken about politics, he has always supported a two-state solution in the Middle East, regardless of any given Israeli government’s policies. American readers may be most familiar with his 2004 memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” which tells Oz’s coming-of-age story against the backdrop of his mother’s suicide and the state of Israel’s founding. (Natalie Portman’s movie version was released this summer.) Oz’s new novel, “Judas,” rendered in sumptuous English by his longtime translator, Nicholas de Lange, similarly exemplifies Saunders’s notion of a relationship between the moral and the aesthetic.