Why I read a story by Amos Oz

Yes, I know I'd said I would never read Amos Oz - after he refused an interview request in advance of a reading he gave at Brown University, this guy who always made time for an interview w/ the NYTimes - but he died a few weeks ago a let us not speak ill of the dead; moreover, the New Yorker last week ran a somewhat lengthy story from Oz, written in the 1960s but not published in English until now so I had to give it a look: All Rivers. I definitely like the title, and as we read the story we see that these are the first 2 words in an unfinished poem written by a woman that the protagonist meets at a coffee shop. On the plus side, this story provides what we hope and expect from good fiction, esp in translation - a glimpse into contemporary (of in this case contemporary 50 years ago) life in a different culture. The protag lives on a kibbutz in Israel and has a passionate interest in philately and seems to have no enduring relationships w/ women - he seems from these stereotypes as if he might be weak and bookish, but we learn that he served and won a valor medal w/ the formidable Israeli army and has great physical strength and dexterity (he can climb stairs on his hands!) - and so are we to think of him as a symbolic stand-in for the young nation (then) of Israel: Don't dismiss us, we're much tougher than we look. Over the course of the story he meets the woman/poet, who's 33 and extremely strange. He sidles up to her in a coffee shop, spends much of the day w/ her, flirting but essentially ignoring her sexual advantages. I think it's fair to say that most normal men we run away from this woman, who seems incredibly self-destructive (throughout their entire encounter she chain smokes and then coughs brutally, while telling him not to touch her). But  he stays w/ her for a while, long enough to miss the appointment (to trade stamps!) that he'd travelled some distance for, and then he goes back to his kibbutz and secures himself in his room to write. So what's the big deal? I'd say that Oz pulls off a neat trick regarding the protagonist and his attempt to recollect his meeting w/ this woman, and I won't give it away, but at the end of the story we have to go back to the beginning and read it in a new light. I have no idea why this story remained untranslated for 50 years; I'm not sure if I'm going to read more of Oz, but this story would pique the interest of many readers.