Touch the Water, Touch the Wind
In both My Michael (1972) and Elsewhere Perhaps (1973) Oz has hinted symbolically at a metaphysical extension of contemporary Israeli lives by taking a fleeting cognizance of the curious incongruities of the country itself with its mix of men and myth, soughing wind under limitless skies. Here although he deals in part with stone-hard artifacts like streets and shops, kibbutz halls and shrieking bombs - he adds a frame of folk/allegorical fantasy. Elisha, the gentle watchmaker's son, recognizes that time is but "an affectation of the mind" as he shivers and starves in a Polish forest away from the Nazis. As naturally as Chagall's creatures amusingly solve gravitational entrapment, Elisha levitates - above "Germans, forests, huts, ghosts, wolves. . ." playing mouth organ music in the night. While his wife, Stefa, queen of Polish intellectuals, skims through other implausibilities to become a kind of comic Barbarella of Stalinist officialdom. After several changes of identity, Elisha at last in a kibbutz produces - among new and old social idealists and eternal crones at their gossip - a mathematical answer to the problem of infinity. Elisha and Stefa are in the end reunited but then disappear - to become as insubstantial as any human beings who reach too far off the earth to escape its corrosive veins of evil. A masterful aggregate of philosophical speculation, witty social commentary and solid story telling. (Kirkus Reviews)