A. B. YEHOSHUA ON AUSTRIAN RADIO FM4

Giving meaning to an absurd death                 

Christian Cummins                                                                                                                         Letters from a shrinking globe: around the day in 80 worlds FM4                                                                                                                                                       4 October 2006

I swear that I have never read a stranger nor more compelling odyssey than Israeli writer AB Yehoshua's "A Women in Jerusalem" which begins like this:

"Even though the manager of the human resources division had not sought such a mission, now, in the softly radiant morning, he grasped its unexpected significance".

An uptight and unnamed Israeli bureaucrat from Jerusalem is in the frozen wastes of a former Soviet Union gradually falling in love with the coffin of a beautiful former employee who he never knew.

It makes Jonathon Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated" seem downright predictable.

Just One More Bomb

The journey begins in Jerusalem, and since this is the 21st century where "pedestrians (are) routinely exploding in the streets" it begins with a suicide bombing. One of the terror victims is the beautiful Slavic woman called Yulia Ragayev, the occupant of the coffin and the only character named in this bizarre and thin little book. But in life Yulia was an anonymous victim. The only reference for identification the authorities find is a pay-slip from a famous bakery showing she worked as a cleaner on the night shift.

A Quest for Lost Humanity

This would be just one more meaningless death on the streets of Jerusalem, if it was not for the article of a local shit-stirring journalist, referred to as "The Weasel". The charge of heartlessness he makes is a piece titled "The Shocking Inhumanity Behind Our Daily Bread" mortifies the owner of the bakery and makes him determined to respond:

"The human resources manager snorted. 'Who cares about such things? And especially in times like these.'

'I care.' The owner replied irritably. 'And especially in times like these... You still don't realise how upsetting it is to be called inhuman. What is left to us if we lose our humanity?'"

The owner charges his manager with ensuring the woman a dignified funeral and so he sets off on his odyssey. He soon overcomes his reluctance and quickly drawn into a moving but unsentimental crusade for spiritual redemption.
He is looking for atonement for the nonsensical bloodshed that is destroying his home city, for the nonsensical conflict that has ruined his marriage and for his indifference to the teaming humanity that he suddenly realises has always been around him.

Hallucinatory Prose

The plot is not the only strange element in the novel. The prose has the sort of hallucinatory effect of a Kafka novel, perhaps enhanced by namelessness of its living characters and the dream-like landscape of frozen Russia. But most of all you can feel the love of good story-telling from a man known as the Faulkner of Israel. It's fast moving, it's very funny, and it's warm. But beneath the surface the bureaucrat's thirsty reawakening left me aching somewhere deep inside.

So when I finished the 198th and final page, I tossed the book over again and started all over:

"Even though the manager of the human resources division had not sought such a mission, now, in the softly radiant morning, he grasped its unexpected significance."

A Voice for Peace in a Worn Torn Land

Yehoshua knows a thing or two of the absurdity of terror fatalities. He spoke at the funeral of two Arab waiters he had got to know well who were among 19 people killed by a lunchtime bomber at Maxim, a seashore restaurant in Haifa, his home town. His book is dedicated to his friend and peace-activist Dafna who was killed by a bomber on Mount Scopus while he was writing this very book. In Israel he is identified with the peace camp, arguing for withdrawal from 80 per cent of the territories occupied in 1967, long before Ariel Sharon contemplated disengagement from Gaza.




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Books by A .B. Yehoshua