Reuters – Israelis on Monday (December 31) paid tribute to Amos Oz, the country’s best-known author, who died of cancer at the age of 79 on Friday (December 28). Mourners, including Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and other leaders, gathered at a Tel Aviv theatre to bid farewell to Oz, who was also an outspoken supporter of a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

“And precisely because your writing was human and universal no less than it was personal and intimate, you told our story far beyond the boundaries of our own small Israel,” said Rivlin during a ceremony attended by Oz’s family and friends.

Over a 50-year career, Oz chronicled his country’s rise from the ashes of the Holocaust and its struggles – among Jews and Arabs, secularists and zealots, conservatives and liberals. His writing – witty, scholarly, and often moody and erotic – won international plaudits, and he was a frequent bookies’ favourite for the Nobel Prize for Literature. But his political views sometimes stirred up rancour at home.

Born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem to Eastern European immigrants, Oz moved to a kibbutz at 15 after his mother’s suicide. He changed his surname to the Hebrew for “might”.