Love and darkness appear to be antithetical; in fact, they are intimate bedfellows, gliding together like the hand inside its glove. We associate love with illumination but more often we are blind and baffled when we love. Darkness betokens ignorance or obscurity, yet there are things we know only in darkness by the touch of our fingertips; such knowledge may be wordless but is irrefutable. In his new memoir, which is easily the finest book he has ever written, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz unfolds “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” as if to demonstrate how intertwined love in all its manifestations is with darkness; how, indeed, love rests on a darkness that is at once terrifying and sustaining.

Mr. Oz’s memoir, beautifully translated by Nicholas de Lange, tells the story of his childhood in Jerusalem in the last years of the Mandate and the first years of the new state. Though he evokes a child’s world with magical strokes, his memoir is in reality the story of his parents, and especially of his mother, as well as of the fantastic, obstreperous, eccentric, and often hallucinatory array of relatives – sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts, cousins – who surrounded them, both supporting and smothering.

Along the way, he provides memorable sketches of any number of celebrated personages, from his neurasthenic great-uncle, the historian and scholar Joseph Klausner to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist S.Y. Agnon, his neighbor and bitter enemy; the poets Chaim Nachman Bialik and Saul Tchernikhowsky, who often came for tea; the fiery Menachim Begin, one of whose speeches the young Amos disrupted by uncontrollable fits of laughter; and Ben-Gurion himself, who summoned the fledgling writer to the Ministry of Defense for a philosophical palaver.

Mr. Oz is a master of characterization, not only because he so succinctly captures the distinctive traits and the foibles of his personages but because, through some subtle and often piercing empathy, he succeeds in seeing his characters from within. Not content to dwell on the mere details of family history, he struggles to grasp what desires and fears, what hopes and dreams, impelled the members of his family. He does this by presenting their vicissitudes through his own childish eyes, so we come to know his mother’s moods or his father’s quirks with a spontaneity that brings them alive.

His effort to understand the adult world in a new land and a new language that are strange to them, but not to him, intensifies the complexity of his search. While he can act, and often does, as a dragoman to his elders, correcting their faulty or stilted Hebrew, they cannot translate their experience for him. Of his mother he remarks at one point, “I have the feeling that my mother wanted me to grow up to express the things that she had been unable to express.” He must piece this inexpressible past together, drawing on anecdotes, fairy tales, snatches of conversation in Russian or Ukrainian or Yiddish, old letters, and diaries.

Mr. Oz displays a fine comic touch in “A Tale of Love and Darkness” (Harcourt, 538 pages, $26), depicting the reactions of his refined European relatives to life in Israel, a country that to many of them appeared hopelessly barbaric. Thus his grandmother, upon arrival, took one sharp look at her surroundings and proclaimed “the famous sentence that was to become her motto for the twenty-five years she lived in Jerusalem, ‘The Levant is full of germs!'” She dealt with an alien environment by disinfecting it mercilessly, forcing her meek husband to whack the bedclothes every morning at 6 a.m. to drive out vermin and germs, spraying every inch of her house with DDT and Lysol, and subjecting young Amos to scalding tubs of antiseptic.

Mr. Oz’s portrait of the great Joseph Klausner is both funny and tender. On their Sunday visits, which entailed crossing most of the city of Jerusalem on foot, he and his parents would find the professor in bed, exhausted from his nocturnal studies:

On this sofa, curled up in the fetal position, covered to his shoulders in a green and red tartan rug, like a Scottish soldier’s kit, his face bare and childlike without his glasses, lay Uncle Joseph himself, thin and small, his elongated brown eyes looking both happy and a little lost. He gave us a feeble wave of his translucent white hand, smiled a pink smile between his white moustache and his goatee, and said something like this: “Come in, my dears, come in, come in … and please forgive me for not standing up to greet you, do not judge me too harshly, for two nights and three days now I have not stirred from my desk or closed my eyes, ask Mrs. Klausner and she will testify on my behalf, I am neither eating nor sleeping.

For the young Amos, his Uncle Joseph was most admirable, for all his foibles, for having added a number of useful words to Modern Hebrew, such as “pencil,” “iceberg,” “shirt,” and “rhinoceros.” And what, he asks, would he have done without such a word as “shirt?” Put on “a coat of many colors?” This question is the first note in a theme struck throughout the memoir: not just the discovery of language by a future writer – that is the stuff of writers’ memoirs after all – but the way in which the language of which he will himself become a master passes through its own childhood and growth simultaneously with him, developing from a formal and high-flown biblical tongue to a tough, street-wise vernacular, as at home in the barracks as in the temple.

Both the love and the darkness of Mr. Oz’s tale are most densely concentrated in his unforgettable depiction of his mother, known as Fania (among other diminutives). Her suicide in 1952, at the age of 38, when Amos Oz was only 12, tinges the memoir with a darkness that shadows every sentence. The child tries to understand but is filled with bitterness and anger, which turn to hatred. How could his mother leave without even saying goodbye, she who had been so strict in teaching him good manners? His anger at her soon turned, however, into self-hatred. Had he been a better son, perhaps she wouldn’t have ended her life. How worthless he must have been that she could do this! The pages in which he describes his mother’s death and its aftermath are some of the saddest I have ever read.

Mr. Oz’s father was a thwarted scholar but his mother was a storyteller. He relates two or three of her tales and they have a spooky Slavic quality. None of these fairy tales related to Israel but hearkened back to Odessa or Rovno and the great primeval forests. When she spoke, “what surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.” The Holy Land was but a pale simulacrum of the past, now lost forever, for his mother’s neighbors and schoolmates, friends and acquaintances, had all been murdered in a single afternoon – 25,000 souls of men, women, and children, including 4,000 babies – by Nazis in the forests outside Rovno. The past lived on exclusively in words: “The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words.”

Amos Oz is a highly tactile writer. He recalls and knows how to evoke the feel of things, the textures of fabrics, the scrape of a beard. He is also a writer who remembers the smells of his childhood, the peculiar scent of the great poet Tchernikhowsky, the paternal odor of the kindly Arab who rescued him when he was lost. Words have smells, too, as well as shapes. This sensuous tussle with words, as though the language were wet clay spurting between his shaping hands to take its final indelible form, gives a dense yet vivid pungency to his prose.

We, too, can smell the stones of the courtyard where he lay looking at the sky; we experience the iron hardness of the soil where he and his father labored to plant a garden. And we feel the warmth of his desperate mother who once crept into bed with him and sobbed herself to sleep on his chest. We are gathered into his family and can almost touch the hot glass of tea that is pressed into our hands as the poets and professors, the future statesmen and the rabble-rousers, the odd aunts and forlorn uncles, gather in the dim parlor for a friendly shouting match in six languages at once.

Amos Oz’s memoir is a kind of covert autobiography. He shows how a child, and a child’s consciousness, are not formed apart but consist of all the familial memories of a past inferred, winkled out, imagined and fixed in words, a past not directly his own but as much his as his veins and nerves. The story of his childhood is also the story of the state of Israel in its rough beginnings, which Mr. Oz relates with considerable dispassion. There is a darkness here, and his account of a visit to the Silwani family and his clumsy attempts to converse with a Palestinian girl, an attempt which ends in disaster, possesses a tragic resonance that sounds throughout the memoir.

“A Tale of Love and Darkness” ends on an inconsolable note with the story of his mother’s last days and hours, and this feels right. The child is not reconciled, nor is the man, at his mother’s final derangement and death. The love is in the telling, in the meticulous evocation of the voices, the tastes and the smells, the faces and the gestures, not in the abolition of the darkness that envelops them. Perhaps, indeed, without the darkness there could not have been such love.