Black Box

Black Box is a 1986 epistolary novel by Amos Oz. The novel's title refers to the black boxes carried by airplanes; these hardy devices record details about the plane that, in the case of a wreck, are later used to piece together the cause of the crash. The term is used metaphorically in Oz' novel, with the “crash” in question being the former marriage of Ilana Bandstatter and Alec Gideon: Alec at one point writes, “As after a plane crash, we have sat down and analyzed, by correspondence, the contents of the black box.” Like all epistolary novels, Black Box takes the form of a series of letters written between different characters. These span not only Ilana and Alec, and Ilana's new husband Michel, but several other characters as well (including, notably, Alec's lawyer, Manfred Zakheim, who provides most of the novel's comic relief). Important to the story is Israel's political environment in the latter 1970's: following the ousting of the Labor government, a religious and conservative tide is rising in Israeli politics, with its eyes on retaking territories recently lost to occupation during the 1967 war.

The novel begins with a letter Ilana sends to her ex-husband, Alec. Alec is a world-renowned expert on fanaticism who now lives in the US, where he teaches at “Midwest University” in Chicago. Their divorce was a bitter and exhausting one, and they have not been in contact since. Ilana's letter begins with many declarations of her love for her new husband, Michel-Henri Sommo, a devout Algerian Jew, and french teacher. She claims she is only writing to Alec at all on behalf of their son, Boaz. Boaz is in his late teens, and is not the average unruly adolescent: at a mere thirteen, he left the kibbutz. Now, at sixteen, he has been expelled from boarding school after getting into a fight with the night watchman and cracking her head. Because Ilana and her new husband have no money, and no power to speak of, she is forced to have recourse to Alec to cover Boaz' legal expenses. Alec, after all, has come into a considerable inheritance with the institutionalization of his father. He now has both money, and, back in Israel, property. Ilana offers to sleep with him as payment, if that's what it takes. Alec responds formally, acceding to Ilana's request for payment, but declining her offer of sex.

But Ilana's first plea is not her last. One request for money follows another in Ilana's letters. The letters also help fill in a lot of detail about their former life together. She admits to being unfaithful to Alec – in fact, the matter of Boaz' paternity was officially called into question during their divorce. For that reason, she got nothing from their divorce settlement, even though they both know that Boaz is Alec's legitimate child, since she didn't start cheating on Alec until after Boaz had been born.



Despite their long and bitter history, Ilana continues to find reasons to ask for money – and so, unexpectedly, does her new husband Michel. Even more unexpectedly, Alec obliges Michel – an act that strikes at the heart of Michel's indignant self-identity as a man of poor means. Michel now has the opportunity to enter business and politics, which he does with both trepidation and excitement. But Michel's feelings towards Alec are ambivalent. Alec's attempts to help Boaz with his money troubles end up angering Michel, who has tried to be a role model for the boy; he resents Alec's secular, from-afar bid at fathering.

As the letters continue to fly, the tension between characters builds, as does the tension provoked by their geopolitical context. Michel's anger, for instance, is complicated by the fact that Alec's money stands to help him buy up West Bank property for Jewish settlement. Boaz and a group of free-loving young pals decide to renovate a desert farmhouse, with unhappy results. And Alec, who learns he is dying of cancer, seems as determined to use his charity to sincerely help his family as to chastise them with the knowledge of their dependence on him. All of the characters are complex, multi-dimensional, and self-contradictory, and so are their communications with each other.

Black Box is a rare modern example of a very old literary form. It has been criticized for its awkward handling of exposition – but this is a traditional weakness of epistolary novels. Besides letters, the correspondences that make up the novel also include telegrams, reports, and even some of Alec's research notes. It also offers considerable insight into an era of Israeli history that is unfamiliar to many; the extremely divergent temperaments and opinions of its main characters can be said to represent different factions – official and non – of 1970's Israeli society. For example, Michel the devout Sephardic Jew, who places his religious duties above all else, stands in stark contrast to young, impetuous, but ultimately good-hearted Boaz, whose interests are decidedly more secular. Black Box was originally written in Hebrew; its English language translation by Nicholas Lange was assisted by the author himself.