Short Paper #2: "Two Tales of A City"

Amos Oz and Orhan Pamuk uniquely personify the cities of Jerusalem and Istanbul underlining the melancholy that exists under their beautiful carefree appearances. This idea is most prominent in their respective biographies A Tale of Love and Darkness and Istanbul: Memories and the City, but it is also apparent in Amos Oz’s fictional novel My Michael.

Both authors personify their cities in such a way that they come alive with emotions of their own. We see the cities as possessing a deep seeded melancholy that they cast as a shadow upon their inhabitants. Pamuk describes this melancholy in great detail in Istanbul calling it “Hüzün”. He tells the reader to “understand hüzün not as the melancholy of a solitary person but the black mood shared by millions of people together” (p. 92) and goes on to speak of the hüzün of the entire city of Istanbul. Oz expresses a similar idea in A Tale of Love and Darkness when he says, “In Jerusalem people always walked rather like mourners at funerals, or latecomers at a concert” (p. 7). Oz implies here that there is a mood of melancholy that encompasses the entire city. 

Both authors also agree on where this melancholy originates from and why it is present in their cities. Pamuk establishes the origin of the melancholy very simply when he says, “the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us” (p. 29). He goes on to say that the city of Istanbul is caught “between tradition and western culture” (p. 115) and divided “along the lines of its many ethnic groups” (p. 115). Pamuk identifies the melancholy of Istanbul as originating from the dying of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire and the emergence of Istanbul and the Turkish Empire. His reasoning for why this transition resulted in melancholy is the fact that the people in the city live among the ruins of Byzantium. He says “The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins” (p. 101) and in his opinion this has a melancholic effect on the people. Pamuk also quotes the famous writer Gautier saying that, “It is difficult to believe there is a living city behind the dead ramparts!” (p. 231).

In a similar way Oz draws up the repeated conquest of Jerusalem as the origin of its melancholy when he says, “The city has been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, and rebuilt again. Conqueror after conqueror has come, ruled for a while, left behind a few walls and towers, some cracks in the stone, a handful of potsherds and documents, and disappeared” (p. 27).  In Oz’s opinion it is the city itself that is responsible for this repeated shift in power. He personifies the city saying, “Jerusalem is an old nymphomaniac who squeezes lover after lover to death before shrugging him off her with a yawn, a black widow who devours her mates while they are still in her” (p. 27). It is clear that Oz, like Pamuk, believes that the melancholy of his city is due to the long history of war, destruction, and drastic cultural upheaval.

Oz and Pamuk both highlight the melancholy of their cities, but they also identify that this melancholy is hidden from the view of unattached tourists. Pamuk quotes a western author as saying, “Istanbul which has some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, is like a theater and best seen from the hall, avoiding the poverty stricken and sometimes filthy neighborhoods in the wings” (p. 222). This particular Western author had become acquainted enough with the city to identify the melancholy within. However, he chose to pretend not to see it, so that he could enjoy the simply beauties of the city that most tourists experience. Pamuk also identifies the contrast between those who see the city realistically and those who only see the surface beauty when he says that he often finds himself in greater agreement with “western observes [who] speak ill of the city” (p. 237), than with those who are “forever going on about Istanbul’s beauty, strangeness, and wondrous uniqueness” (p. 237).

Oz express this idea of beauty and melancholy coexisting in one city by having one of his fictional character say in My Michael that, “Jerusalem is the biggest city in the world. As soon as you cross two or three streets you are in a different continent, a different generation, even a different climate” (p. 219). This statement was brought about by the characters comparison of the beauty of a Saturday outing in a park to the gloom of their daily lives within the heart of the city streets.  Oz further explores this idea in his biography, A Tale of Love and Darkness, when he says that “The Jerusalem [his] parents looked up to lay far from the area where [they] lived” (p. 3). He describes the city as having two distinct realities. One reality was of the poverty and hardships, in which he lived. The other reality he describes when he says “Over the hills and far way, the city of Tel Aviv was [] an exciting place, from which came the newspapers, rumors of theater, opera, ballet, and cabaret, as well as modern art, party politics, echoes of stormy debates, and indistinct snatches of gossip” (p. 6). It is clear that Oz sees the beauty and excitement that visitors to Jerusalem’s tourist areas would experience as well as the melancholy that is imbedded within the people’s daily lives. 

As we have seen through the biographies and novels of Amos Oz and Orhan Pamuk, the cities of Jerusalem and Istanbul can be uniquely personify by underlining the melancholy that exists beneath their beautiful carefree appearances.