Oz tended to present protagonists in a realistic light with an ironic touch while his treatment of the life in the kibbutz was accompanied by a somewhat critical tone. Oz credited a 1959 translation of American writer Sherwood Anderson's short story collection "Winesburg, Ohio" with his decision to "write about what was around me." In "A Tale of Love and Darkness", his memoir of coming of age in the midst of Israel's violent birth pangs, Oz credited Anderson's "modest book" with his own realization that "the written world ... always revolves around the hand that is writing, wherever it happens to be writing: where you are is the center of the universe." In his 2004 essay "How to Cure a Fanatic" (later the title essay of a 2006 collection), Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute – one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise.