Life & Wisdom Quote by Amos Oz

A whole childhood argument is smuggled into that casual “scale of values”: culture as a measuring stick, not an encounter. Amos Oz isn’t merely recalling a family preference for Europe; he’s exposing a particular Zionist bourgeois reflex in mid-century Jewish life, where “Western” functioned as both aspiration and alibi. In that world, refinement came stamped with a passport. Accent, manners, books, even furniture could become evidence in a private trial deciding who counted as modern.

The line works because it’s both intimate and accusatory. “My parents” narrows the target, sparing the reader a sermon, yet the phrasing invites us to see a larger social pattern. Oz’s irony is restrained: he doesn’t mock them outright, he lets the logic indict itself. If “more Western” automatically means “more cultured,” then culture becomes a hierarchy disguised as taste. It’s a kind of self-colonization, where the periphery internalizes the center’s verdict and learns to crave it.

Context matters: Oz grew up in Jerusalem in the pre-state and early-state years, in a society trying to invent itself while haunted by Europe - both as the source of intellectual prestige and as the site of catastrophe. The quote hints at the tension between Hebrew revival and European longing, between local rootedness and imported standards. Beneath it is a quieter question Oz returns to across his work: what gets lost when a nation-building project borrows its definition of “cultured” from somewhere else?