A. B. Yehoshua: Power and pity

The writer AB Yehoshua was 50 pages into a new novel, about a nun claimed corpse in a Jerusalem suicide bombing, when a friend was killed by a bomb at the Hebrew university in 2002. Though shocked, hesays, her death "persuaded me that I was writing something real". Hewas further spurred by the targeting of a seashore restaurant he frequented in Haifa. "Two Arab waiters I used to have conversations with were killed in a terrible bomb, with a whole [Jewish] family," hesays. "I went to their funeral at an Arab village in the north."

Yet the casualty in his novel, published in Hebrew as The Mission ofthe Human Resource Man (2004), is neither Jewish nor Palestinian, but aRussian Orthodox temporary resident, Yulia Ragayev, a cleaner whosebody lies unidentified in a Jerusalem morgue until a bloodied paysliplinks her to a major bakery. The owner, shamed by a journalist's jibeof callous indifference, resolves to atone for their neglect by havinghis human resource manager escort the corpse home for burial. Thebureaucrat's journey, on which he appears to fall in love with the deadwoman, becomes a pilgrimage to restore lost humanity in circumstanceswhere "pedestrians were routinely exploding in the streets".

"I took the most anonymous, most marginal death," says Yehoshua, whofeels Israeli society is unable to honour civilian casualties. "We'reused to soldiers dying, but the problem is how to mourn civilians dyingin the city streets - Israelis, Arabs, foreign workers. What's themeaning of someone drinking coffee who's killed in a café, or ahousekeeper on a bus? We have to give meaning to this absurd death,instead of trying to repress it." In the face of what he sees as agrowing heartlessness and indifference to death on both sides, he says,"as a writer, my ethical duty is to use my pen to pierce the blackplastic shroud, to open the heart towards death, with love and pity."

The novel is published here as A Woman in Jerusalem: A Passion inThree Parts (Halban), translated by Hillel Halkin. Yehoshua's eighth,it appears after he was shortlisted for the inaugural Man BookerInternational prize last year. He also writes short stories (collectedin 1999 as The Continuing Silence of a Poet), and is a playwright,essayist and, at 69, retired professor of comparative literature atHaifa university. Saul Bellow named him "one of Israel's world-classwriters". As its leading Sephardic author, a fifth-generationJerusalem-born descendant of Jews expelled from Spain during theinquisition, he argues for Israel's Mediterranean, rather than purelywestern, identity, and for a common history, in part, between Jews andArabs.

Some of his arguments have provoked fury. He was in London aftertelling the American Jewish Committee in Washington DC last month thathe owes his Jewish identity to being Israeli, not to Judaism orreligion (he is secular). Israeli identity, he believes, is the "full,complete Jewish identity". As he said at London's ICA earlier thismonth: "You [in the diaspora] are partial Jews and we're total Jews.You can't be fully British and fully Jewish - only partially Jewish." Aheated debate continued in Ha'aretz, and led Yehoshua to apologise,without altering his views, "to anyone whose feelings I have hurt". Healso espouses what he terms an "old-fashioned Zionist premise" that thefailure to establish a Jewish state in Eretz Israel after the Balfourdeclaration of 1917 was a tragically missed opportunity, and that,"indirectly, the Jewish people itself was responsible for its ownterrible fate" in the 20th century.

In Israel he is identified with the peace camp, arguing forwithdrawal from 80 per cent of the territories occupied in 1967, longbefore Ariel Sharon contemplated disengagement from Gaza ("I wasagainst the settlements, which were a great obstacle to peace; in moneyand blood, a disaster"), and for recognition of the Palestinian rightto a separate state ("Now the majority [of Israelis] recognise that asa solution"). He sees moves in Britain for an academic boycott ofIsrael as "unjust and discriminatory", not least since "so many peoplein universities are peace activists". He adds, "I'd have understood it20 years ago, when Begin was in power, but Israel is changing itspolicies."

A Woman in Jerusalem was written in the "gloomy days" after thesecond intifada broke out in 2000. But the preceding novel, TheLiberated Bride (2001), emerged from "more hopeful days" in the late1990s, after the Oslo accords. As Yochanan Rivlin, a Haifa professor,researches the roots of Algeria's civil war of the 1990s, and pokes hisnose into the mystery of his son's sudden divorce, he bumbles freelyacross boundaries between father and son, husband and wife, teacher andstudent, Jerusalem and Ramallah, Jewish and Palestinian homes.

The doting, sometimes explosive, relationship between the meddlingprofessor and his wife, a judge, was modelled, the author admits, onhis own 46-year marriage to a psycho-analyst, Rivka ("I get freeanalytic treatment every day for 14 hours, without pay or permission toquestion"). The couple, who live in Haifa, keep a flat in Tel Aviv tobe near their daughter and two sons (and three granddaughters). ButRivlin draws partly on Yehoshua's father, an Israeli Orientalist.Rivlin abhors as "racist" a colleague's contention that Arabs could"never understand the idea of freedom". Yet Yehoshua approves ofRivlin's own quest to understand the "Arab mind" and "Arab soul" - aproject critically dissected in Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said,whose disciples are said in the novel to be "terrorising the academiccommunity". Yehoshua says: "I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently- his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh - and we had Arabfriends. His task of understanding the Arabs - not only politics butpoetry - was very important; he took it as a vocation. We're livingwith the Arabs; we have to understand them ... Through knowing theArabs, you know yourself better."

Avraham Yehoshua was born in 1936. "I come from two parts of theoriental community - Jerusalemite and north African Jews," he says. Hispaternal ancestors came to Palestine at the beginning of the 19thcentury. His father's histories of Sephardic Jerusalem fed what someregard as Yehoshua's masterpiece, the novel Mr Mani (1990), whichtraces six generations of the Sephardic Mani clan, and Jewish identity,through conversations ranging from a 1980s kibbutz to 19th-centuryGreece. Yehoshua's mother came with her family from Morocco in the1930s. His maternal grandfather, a wealthy trader, inspired A Journeyto the End of the Millennium (1997), a novel about a 10th-centuryJewish merchant who arrives in monogamous Europe with two wives and anArab business partner. An operatic version, for which Yehoshua wrotethe libretto, premiered in Tel Aviv last year.

He lived in Jerusalem as a child when it was under siege in the 1948war, and studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrewuniversity of Jerusalem. He spent four years in Paris before serving asa paratrooper in the six-day war of 1967. In his view, 1967 was a "justwar", while the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was "unnecessary andunjust". His first novel, The Lover (1977), was set partly during the1973 Yom Kippur war. With its alternating narrators and grandmother onher deathbed, it has been described as a Hebrew As I Lay Dying, whilehis second, A Late Divorce (1982), owes more to The Sound and the Fury.Along with the influence of Faulkner, Yehoshua cites Kafka ("I learnedhow he handled metaphysics") and the Israeli Nobel laureate SY Agnon.

Yehoshua belongs to the "generation of the state", Israeli writers -including Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld - who came of age after 1948,and chart growing tensions between humanism and Israeli nationalism."We put more emphasis on the individual and the anti-hero than thegeneration who went through the war of independence," he says. Thefragmentation of marriages and families in his fiction echoes nationalunease.

He sees Israel as a multicultural and multifaith society in whichIsraeli Palestinians, a fifth of the population, are a "nationalminority". Yet he draws a distinction between identity and citizenship(Israeli Palestinians are citizens, but "have their own identity",though they "participate in Israeli life"). A move from citizenship toidentity, he says, depends on progress in peace. At least one reviewerof A Woman in Jerusalem, Primo Levi biographer Carole Angier,questioned why the author chose to make his symbol of the alien Other aRussian Christian rather than a Palestinian. "Jerusalem doesn't belongonly to Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims and Jews, but to the world,"Yehoshua says. "We can't solve the conflict without Jerusalem, but wecan't divide up the holy place and cradle of monotheisms, or say itbelongs to one country." He advocates that a square kilometre of theold city be run as a "kind of Vatican" by representatives of the threereligions, while the rest of the city is partitioned between Israel andPalestine. "Christians should say, 'enough of your quarrels - holyJerusalem belongs to all of us'."

As for his remarks in Washington, the diaspora, he clarifies, is notirrelevant to the future of Jewish identity, but Jewish values are"made in real life, not in theory". Alluding to an Israeli high-courtdecision last month to uphold a law denying Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza married to Israeli citizens the right to live in thecountry with their spouses and children, he says: "You can't talk about justice while you're not giving an Arab the right to bring his wife toIsrael; it's a violation of human rights. You can't just speak aboutvalues - you have to test them ... My Jewish values are not located ina fancy spice box to be opened on Shabbat. I'm judged every day on myJewishness. Do we want to hasten economic growth at the price ofgreater poverty, or to sell arms to bloody dictatorships to increaseemployment? These are ethical questions that determine our identity."

In his essays, The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt (1998), Yehoshuaargued that modern literary criticism had abandoned moral judgments,but ethical questions are vital to his own fiction. While hisconception of identity can be problematic, his impulse is partly toreinvigorate moral debate. Exasperated by what he sees as uncriticalbacking for Israel, he says, "The US could have been a betterpeacemaker, but it didn't stop the settlements - as it could have 30years ago. The diaspora [in the US] was following what the governmentof Israel was doing. I said, 'you have the right to full criticism of Israel, even if you're not living there. As I criticise you, you havethe right to criticise me'."

The Guardian