Amoz Oz wrote Elsewhere, Perhaps when he was 27. It was his second novel. Set in the fictional town of Metsudat Ram, an Israeli Kibbutz, in a valley near a disputed border. If the desert heat doesn’t threaten their way of life than the enemies in the mountains do. The people of the kibbutz believe in the secular-humanistic principals of a collective society, spending their days working in the fields and their evenings eating in the dining hall or arguing politics in their homes. In Metsudat Ram gossip moves faster than the hot wind. Rueven Harishman’s wife has left him for the business partner of Ezra Berger’s brother. When Rueven is rumored to be finding his way into Ezra’s wife’s bed at night, Reuven’s sixteen year old daughter is seen visiting Ezra on his return trips from the city. 

Written in the collective first-person point-of-view of the people in the kibbutz while playing an omniscient narrator and often shifting into first person. The novel is an examination of the kibbutz life, of love even among sadness and betrayal, where family and belonging and love are greater than our sins.