The love and darkness of his title refer to his mother, whose suffering from severe depression led her to take her own life when he was a boy.

Importantly, his mother's 1952 overdose of sleeping pills becomes the point of exploration for the work, launching the deep probing into other parts of his childhood and youth.

As a child, he crossed paths with prominent figures in Israeli society, among them Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and David Ben-Gurion.

[4] Elias Khoury, a Palestinian-Israeli lawyer whose father Daoud was a victim in a suicide bombing of Zion Square and whose son George was shot to death by Palestinian militants who mistook him for a Jew (see George Khoury), paid to have the book translated into Arabic and distributed in Beirut and other Arab cities in order to promote better understanding of the Jewish people's narrative of national rebirth.

[6] The translation was praised by New York Magazine's book reviewer Boris Kacha as "preserving the author’s gorgeous, discursive style and his love of wordplay.

"[12] New York magazine reviewer Boris Kachika described the book as very well written, though "sometimes meandering," but all in all a "sophisticated and searing memorial.

"[7] The Jewish Book Council reviewer, Maron L. Waxmon called it "a masterful double memoir" of both himself and "Israel's birth and early years.