Amos Elon was one of the most prominent Israeli writers. He’s just died at the age of 82. By coincidence, we were both born in Vienna, where his father was a businessman, and my father had gone as a concert pianist. There was a sense that we were two of a kind, who should have been arguing in a café late into the night, except that the Nazis and the Communists had stolen the life we might have led as though characters in a novel by Arthur Schnitzler or Joseph Roth. Amos’s last and finest book, The Pity of It All, is about the tragic interaction of Germans and the Jews in their midst, and it is filled with a kind of historic regret that mass-murder was the end of it.
So — some vignettes. I was a correspondent in the Six Day War in 1967. I called on Amos in Tel Aviv. Exhausted, he just wanted to sleep. He’d been in the Sinai, a junior officer in a jeep with General Avram Joffe, a large and rumbustious figure who’d been surveying the battlefield through field-glasses. When the Egyptians began firing at them, Amos told how he had taken cover by lying on the floor, but General Joffe remained upright, and Amos heard him say, “God, war is so boring!” The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo couldn’t have bettered it.
Then at the time of the first Gulf War, with Saddam Hussein threatening to burn half of Israel, Amos appeared on Austrian television. Walking to his hotel in Vienna after the program, he passed a bookshop with a lighted window containing a mass of Middle East material. Standing there, a little old man said to Amos that he hoped Saddam would drive the Jews into the sea. Rather dismayed, Amos asked him why. Because then, came the unexpected answer, some of the Jews might come back to Vienna, and life would become interesting and tolerable once more.
Amos was a man of the Left, contentious and caustic. For reasons I could never quite fathom, I had some special license to debate with him, pressing him to admit the false assumptions, inconsistencies, and follies of the Left, and especially the belief that the famous two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation is practical politics rather than the Utopian fantasy it so clearly is. It really was as though we were out-of-date cosmopolitans from a Viennese café. One day I was about to go on a National Review cruise and he was about to go on a similar cruise for The Nation. He suggested that the two cruises ought to meet on the ocean like pirates and do battle, all of us naturally wearing formal evening dress and black tie.