BENJAMIN TAMMUZ

Requiem for Na’aman

1982

AT OUR FIRST MEETING, Benjamin Tammuz asked if Alan Pryce-Jones was any relation. Since my father got around everywhere, this was a question I was used to. Alan’s book about Beethoven had been published in 1933 and now I learned that it had been translated into Hebrew. At the time a teenager in British Mandated Palestine, Tammuz had read the Hebrew edition and said that he had been influenced by it. His own novels, Minotaur especially, have a resonance all their own. The inscription he wrote in my copy of Requiem for Na’aman is in Hebrew and I cannot read it.