“Oz’s strangest, riskiest, and richest novel.” — Washington Post Book World Israel, just before the Six-Day War. On a kibbutz, the country’s founders and their children struggle to come to terms with their land and with each other. The messianic father exults in accomplishments that had once been only dreams; the son longs to establish an identity apart from his father; the fragile young wife is out of touch with reality; and the gifted and charismatic “outsider” seethes with emotion. Through the interplay of these brilliantly realized characters, Oz evokes a drama that is chillingly, strikingly universal. “[Oz is] a peerless, imaginative chronicler of his country’s inner and outer transformations.” — Independent (UK) AMOS OZ (1939–2018) was born in Jerusalem. He was the recipient of the Prix Femina, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Primo Levi Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award, among other international honors. His work, including A Tale of Love and Darkness and In the Land of Israel , has been translated into forty-four languages.  A Perfect Peace By Amos Oz, Hillel Halkin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Copyright © 1982 Amos Oz and Am Oved All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-15-671683-3 Contents Title Page, Contents, Copyright, Winter, Spring, About the Author, CHAPTER 1 One day a man may just pick up and walk out. What he leaves behind stays behind. What's left behind has nothing to stare at but his back. In the winter of 1965 Yonatan Lifshitz decided to leave his wife and the kibbutz on which he had been born and raised. He had finally made up his mind to run away and start a new life. All through his childhood and adolescence, and for all his years in the army, he had been hemmed in by a tight little circle of men and women who had been interfering every step of the way. He had begun to feel they were keeping him from something and that he mustn't let them do it any more. Often, when they sat around talking in their usual way of some "positive development" or "negative phenomenon," he could barely grasp what the words meant. Sometimes when he stood by himself at a window toward the close of day to watch the birds fly off into the twilight, he calmly accepted the certainty that these birds will all die in the end. Should an announcer on the evening news speak of "grave indications," he would whisper to himself, So what? If, while taking an afternoon ramble by the burned-out cypress trees at the far end of the kibbutz, he should run into someone who asked what he was doing there, he would say, as if loath to reply, "Oh, I'm just walking around." Yet a moment later he would ask himself, "What am I doing here?" A splendid fellow, they said of him on the kibbutz. If only he weren't such an introvert. But that's the way he is, they said. A sensitive soul. Now, at twenty-six, of a reserved, or was it pensive, demeanor, he found himself longing to be alone at last, entirely alone, to find for himself what it was all about. There were times he felt his whole life passing by in a clamorous, smoke-filled room where a tedious argument about some bizarre matter dragged endlessly on. He neither knew what this argument was about nor wished to take part in it. The only thing he wanted was to pick up and walk out, to go someplace else, a place where he was waited for — and would not be waited for forever. Benya Trotsky — whom Yonatan had never seen, not even in a photograph — had run away from the kibbutz and from the country in 1939, six weeks before Yonatan was born. He was a raving theoretician, a fiery student from Kharkov who had chosen to become a conscientious laborer in a stone quarry in the Upper Galilee. Then he lived for a while in our kibbutz, where, against his principles, he fell in love with Hava, Yonatan's mother; he loved her in the most honored Russian fashion — with tears, oaths, and feverish confessions. It was too late, for Hava was already pregnant by Yolek, and had moved into his cabin at the far end of the settlement. One evening, at the end of that winter, after endless complications, letters, threatened suicides, hysterical cries behind the hayloft, group discussions, efforts to find a reasonable solution — after a nervous breakdown and a discreet medical treatment — it came this Trotsky's turn to stand guard duty. Armed with the kibbutz's antique revolver, he had faithfully watched over us until the break of dawn, when, stricken by ultimate despair, he lay in wait for her in the bushes by the laundry room. Leaping out he fired at her at close range. Then, with the piercing howl of a shot dog, he ran blindly to the cowshed, where he fired twice at Yolek, who was finishing the night milking, and once at Stakhanov, our only bull. With startled kibbutzniks, roused from their beds by the shots, now hot on his heels, the wretched man dived behind a pile of manure and aimed the last bullet into his own brain. All those sh