A. B. YEHOSHUA IN JEWISH QUARTERLY

Fiction turbulent as life

Samantha Ellis surveys the career of A. B. Yehoshua

Spring 2006 - Number 201
The Jewish Quarterly

The eponymous anti-hero of A. B. Yehoshua’s first novel, The Lover (1997), is a febrile young man, born in Israel but living in France, who returns to claim a legacy. His grandmother, however, is not dead, merely unconscious. The matron at her nursing home is thrilled to discover that she is 93 and was born in Jerusalem in 1881. ‘That was when the first Bilu settlers arrived in the country,’ she says. ‘Hibbat Zion . . . the beginnings of Zionism . . . to say nothing of world history. Isn’t it amazing? She was alive then . . . a lady of history.’ Her grandson, however, is no patriot. His return brings havoc; he falls in love with a married woman, tears apart her family and then, finding himself at the front in the Yom Kippur War, spends most of his time eating cake before deserting.

Yehoshua’s books often feature these disruptive diasporites, and they are often contrasted with characters who robustly define themselves as Israeli. Yehoshua’s sympathies are certainly with the latter group, although his background is unique among the writers who came of age with the state. He is of the generation who, with Yehuda Amichai, could feel that ‘When I was young, the whole country was young’, but his connection with the land predates the State; he was born in Jerusalem in 1936. He is Sephardi (his father’s family came from Salonika, his mother’s from Morocco), but his family has been in Jerusalem so long (five generations on his father’s side, three on his mother’s) that he identifies himself simply as Israeli.

Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock (1993) includes an attack on Yehoshua for precisely this; one of his characters has a rant against ‘these victorious Jews’, adding ‘I don’t just mean the Kahanes and the Sharons. I mean them all, the Yehoshuas and Ozes included.’ He goes on to excoriate

the ‘beautiful Israelis’ who want their Zionist thievery and their clean conscience too. What do they know about ‘Jewish’, these ‘healthy, confident’ Jews who look down their noses at you Diaspora ‘neurotics’?

It might be a fair criticism if Yehoshua’s characters were bland, confident Israelis, fresh out of the melting pot with no sense of history, but the opposite is true. Yehoshua may wish Israelis were bolder in their self-definition, but he is more than aware of how hard a task this is.

Perhaps that is why he is so dedicated to monologues. He uses them differently in each book. In The Lover, different characters narrate the story, sometimes reporting on the same scene but with the switch in perspective changing or distorting what has gone before. In 1989’s Mr Mani, Yehoshua tells the story through five conversations, each with one half missing, making the reader supply the missing dialogue. The voices he creates - individual, insistent and idiosyncratic - create the sense of Israel as cacophony.

In a single novel, such as A Late Divorce (1982), Yehoshua can switch from a troubled woman whose internal voice is dreamlike poetry (‘Violet light seeps from a mortal wound’) to a venomous lawyer losing his syntax in his fury at anyone who gets in his way: ‘honk honk your head off you fucking Volvo you just wait till my son crosses the street you bitch’. Since we hear their internal voices rather than the politer tones they take in public, it becomes clear that here is little possibility of real understanding between these two, let alone the many other characters in the book. A pivotal character in the novel is a confused historian who studies the distant past but cannot fathom the contradictions of his family.

Historians are important in Yehoshua’s work - his own father wrote 12 books about the history of Sephardim in Jerusalem - and his characters are always striving to understand the past. Molkho, the protagonist of the heartbreaking Five Seasons (1987), seems to sleepwalk through life. He nurses his wife through a long illness, but her death does not free him. Instead, like Orpheus trying to rescue Eurydice from the underworld, he has to journey back into his wife’s past to try and understand, heal her or even exorcise her. His quest takes him, via a series of incomprehensible and disturbing encounters with women, to Berlin, where he visits the street where his wife grew up, and where her father committed suicide. The street is ‘unpronounceable’ to him. (‘I’m a fifth-generation Sephardi in this country,’ he says to a group of fellow Israelis at one point, ‘and Europe is another world to us.’) Even so, he finds the building where ‘long ago, her faith in life already shattered, a young girl had stepped forth from one of those doors on her way to Jerusalem’. Perhaps he has discovered the real reason for his wife’s death, and the cancer was just the manifestation of what really killed her. Yet Molkho is still afraid he may have killed her through an overdose of painkillers. He cannot accept natural causes; her death must be murder or suicide. When he visits relatives in France, they question him about Israel, repeating ‘Are you trying to commit national suicide?’ until Molkho finally admits, ‘I really don’t know much about politics.’

Suicide and survival are the themes of the novel Yehoshua published next. Mr Mani is a passionate, fraught epic-in-reverse about five generations of – yes - a Sephardi family in Israel. The first Mr Mani is a middle-aged Jerusalem judge who is unaccountably overtaken by the desire to kill himself. Yehoshua undertakes a sort of historical psychoanalysis, taking the reader back in time to find out why. In 1944, we encounter a previous Mr Mani who tells the Nazis he has ‘cancelled’ his Jewish identity. In the Jerusalem of 1918 another Mr Mani is discovered exhorting Arabs to

Get ye an identity . . . before it is too late! All over the world people now have identities, and we Jews are on our way, and you had better have an identity, or else!

The novel then jumps back to 1899, where a Mr Mani throws himself under a train for love of a woman he met at the Third Zionist Congress. Finally, in 1848, Avraham Mani finds his son, Yosef, attempting to ‘remind’ Arabs that they are ‘Jews who do not know they are Jews’. When Yosef is murdered, leaving his marriage unconsummated, Avraham ensures the continuation of his line by sleeping with his own daughter-in-law. Against the odds, and despite their suicidal impulses, the Manis are propelled forward through the generations. Even the suicidal judge ends the narrative on a walk with his grandson, born against the odds.

Yehoshua underlines the point by associating a pivotal character, an aging rabbi, with two breakaway groups - the Marranos and the Donmeh. Both secretly practise, or practised, Judaism, but while the Marranos escaped the Inquisition by pretending to be Christians, the Donmeh pretended to convert to Islam while remaining committed not to mainstream Judaism but to the controversial tenets of Shabbetai Tsvi, who had himself become a Muslim. Yehoshua seems to be saying there is no answer to the questions about roots, and that the important thing is to survive and move forward. It is a peculiar conclusion for a Sephardi author to come to in a novel tracing back a family’s Sephardi roots.

Much more appealing, perhaps, to Sephardim, was Journey to the End of the Millennium (1997), a more straightforward historical novel about a Jewish merchant with two wives who leaves North Africa to travel to Paris in order to defend polygamy to the Ashkenazis who repudiate it. His defeat is figured as the victory of the cold, rational Ashkenazim over the colourful, life-loving Sephardim.

In this, and in 1994’s Open Heart, Yehoshua all but ignored the pressing claims of politics to focus on the distant past and the vagaries of love. But in 2001 he published The Liberated Bride, perhaps his most complex novel yet, and one imprinted with the times; he began it in 1998, as the hopes raised at Oslo were still (just) alive, and finished it just after the start of the second intifada. It’s a troubled, nervous novel, but there is almost a sense of comfort in returning to this state of anxiety, as if this was Yehoshua’s natural mode as a writer.

The novel also reads as a kind of riposte to the younger Israeli writers whose apolitical, irreverent postmodernism has so distressed Yehoshua. In particular, the novel reclaims the right to write Arab characters after Etgar Keret accused Yehoshua of patronising them, citing in particular the character of a mute Arab in Yehoshua’s 1962 short story ‘Facing the Forests’. In 2005, Keret told Tikkun magazine that Yehoshua was emblematic of left-wing Israeli fiction:

Many times, you meet those mute Arabs [through whom] the Israeli narrators and writers tell the reader exactly what they want. I think much left-wing writing has a very patronizing subtext, saying, ‘We are for peace and we know what the Palestinians want.’ I’ve never tried to write a realistic text in which I’ve claimed to know what’s going on inside a Palestinian’s mind.

The Arab in ‘Facing the Forests’ may be mute, but he is eloquent. The story is narrated by a student who takes a summer job as a fire watcher, guarding the Israeli forests, symbols of the new country’s regeneration. ‘Forests . . . What forests?’ he wonders. ‘Since when do we have forests in this country?’ He goes off with a suitcase full of books about his thesis topic, the Crusades, but finds himself overwhelmed by the forest, and by the mute Arab. ‘His tongue was cut out during the war,’ writes Yehoshua. ‘By one of them or one of us? Does it matter? Who knows what the last words were that stuck in his throat?’ The fire watcher is also turned mute by his inability to communicate; he does not speak Arabic and the Arab does not understand Hebrew.

Finally, the fire watcher finds a word he can say to the Arab and be understood; some hikers ask him about an Arab village that once stood where the forest has been planted. The fire watcher wakes the Arab in the middle of the night

and whispers the name of the village. The Arab does not understand. His eyes are consumed with weariness. The fire watcher’s accent may be at fault. He tries again, therefore, repeats the name over and over and the Arab listens and suddenly he understands. An expression of surprise, of wonder and eagerness suffuses all his wrinkles. He jumps up, stands there in his hairy nakedness and flings up a heavy arm in the direction of the window, pointing fervently, hopelessly at the forest.

The Arab tries to say ‘that this is his house and that there used to be a village here as well and that they have simply hidden it all, buried it in the big forest’. When he burns down the forest, the fire watcher does nothing to stop him, smiling the next morning as ‘there, out of the smoke and haze, the ruined village appears before his eyes’.

In his first novel, The Lover, Yehoshua gave his Arab characters not just voices, but interior monologue. The story is told through different monologues, but it is nearly half-way through when an Arab character suddenly addresses the reader. It comes as something as a shock to hear him speaking directly, apparently from the inside. Na’im is 14, working at a garage, yet nursing a love of poetry (he can recite Bialik by heart) and struggling to understand his place in the country and in the world. Every day he takes a bus from his village to work, and on the way back, as the last Jewish travellers leave the bus, the driver tunes the radio to a Baghdad station that broadcasts verses from the Koran, to entertain us. We go deeper into the mountains, driving among orchards on a narrow road twisting among the fields and there’s nothing to remind us of the Jews, not even an army jeep. Only Arabs, barefooted shepherds in the fields with their sheep. Like there never was a Balfour Declaration, no Herzl, no wars. Quiet little villages, everything like they say it used to be many years ago, and even better. And the bus fills with the warbling of the imam from Baghdad, a soft voice lovingly chanting the suras.

Na’im finally sleeps with his Jewish boss’s daughter. It is a mutual seduction, his first time as well as hers, and a startling articulation of the marriage metaphor for the Israelis relationship with the Palestinians - less Help Us To Divorce (to cite the title of a passionate polemic by Amos Oz) than a hope we might marry.

For a while Yehoshua gave up writing Arab characters. He told interviewers that he did not think it was possible, the political situation being as it was, for an Israeli novelist to do so. But he returned to the fray in The Liberated Bride, centred on a protagonist who reads like an alter ego. Rivlin is, like Yehoshua, a professor at Haifa University (his field is Near Eastern Studies, while Yehoshua’s is Hebrew Literature), and he moves uneasily between the Orientalists and the Arabs who confound attempts to categorize them. The novel opens at a wedding in an Arab village in the Galilee; the bride, Samaher, is a student at the university. Rivlin’s colleague gives an inappropriate speech about his belief that ‘Arabs . . . could never understand - let alone respect, desire or implement - the idea of freedom’. Later, Rivlin fiercely rejects the postmodern ideas of another colleague who believes national identity is a fictive construct. A third academic, Rivlin’s mentor Tedeschi, will not engage with Arabs as Rivlin does because ‘Real-life Arabs, let alone real-life Jews, make me too dizzy to think straight.’

In contrast, Rivlin (and Yehoshua) are eager to face up to real-life people, in all their complexity. This is a dazzlingly vertiginous novel. Its sliver of a plot concerns a mystery; some years ago, Rivlin’s son’s marriage broke up and he is frantic to find out why. We are let into the secret half-way through, but Rivlin never learns what happened, despite his increasingly desperate attempts. ‘You think you can call up ghosts and control them,’ fumes his son, as he learns of Rivlin’s intrusions. ‘When will you realize there are things that you don’t have to understand . . . You’re always poking at things. Well, poke at your Arabs, not at me.’

Rivlin has no sense of boundaries - in fact, he positively relishes crossing them. His wife, a judge, rebuffs him when he tries to seduce her in her office because ‘good times that came from crossing boundaries and mixing worlds were not [her] cup of tea’. The novel is full of arguments for boundaries and separation, but Rivlin finds it impossible to stay where he is. ‘You Jews are always coming and going. It will make you sick in the end,’ warns an Arab friend, and Rivlin reflects happily that the airport is ‘the erotic epicentre of the Jewish state’. He travels ceaselessly in the novel, from Haifa to Jerusalem, to the airport, to the Galilee and to Ramallah, where he watches a Lebanese nun sing with the voice of an angel and sees Samaher perform in a Palestinian production of The Dybbuk.

When he does attempt to demarcate areas of his life, he fails. ‘When will you write about us?’ ask Samaher’s family, when he explains that he is studying post-colonial Algeria. His research gets an unexpected boost when he is given the papers of another academic, who has ‘burned the midnight oil to understand the Arab mind’. The stories, poems and folklore provide insights that Rivlin hopes will shed light on the causes of the Algerian civil war, but when he photocopies the papers for Samaher to translate, he finds them splattered with blood; their author was carrying them when he was murdered by a suicide bomber.

The many switches in perspective are invigorating, as if Yehoshua is arguing for the power of fiction not just to develop empathy but also to show that nothing is as simple as it seems. Rivlin makes repeated, abortive attempts to visit S. A. Agnon’s house in Jerusalem, at one point turning up to find it closed.

Was this, Rivlin wondered, the place he had wanted to abscond to? The ugly backyard of an author for whom the world’s beauty existed only in language and human relationships?

When he later gets into the house, he finds it full of ‘books, with their endless hairsplitting commentaries, [which] never helped the Jews to survive’. Can fiction help us find a way to live? Translating the murdered scholar’s stories, magical tales of floating babies and poisoned livestock, Samaher tells Rivlin, ‘if a story has the right ending, it can be about anything’ - and the ending of The Liberated Bride is, despite its uncertainty and inconclusiveness, full of hope. But it is not a tidy ending; Rivlin never solves the mystery but is left in the muddle, still seeking answers. And maybe this is the point. Rivlin, we are told, does not read novels because ‘Life is too turbulent.’ Yehoshua’s work reads as if he is trying to write the kind of fiction Rivlin could enjoy reading, fiction as turbulent as life itself.


Samantha Ellis is a freelance writer and playwright. Her radio play, Snow and Sugar, will be on BBC Radio 4 this summer.

© 2006 Jewish Quarterly


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