A. B. Yehoshua

Avraham B. Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem on December 19, 1936, into a Sephardi-Mizrahi family with roots in the city extending back at least five generations.[3] His father, Ya’akov Yehoshua, was a historian who wrote about Jerusalem’s Sephardi community, while his mother, Malka, was the daughter of a wealthy Moroccan businessman.[3] Malka was born in Morocco and immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1932.[4] His father worked as a translator for the British Mandatory government, spoke and wrote Arabic fluently, and authored twelve books in Arabic.[4]

Yehoshua attended the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood.[5] At fifteen, he began writing humorous sketches that he performed in the Scouts, at school celebrations, and for friends.[5] Students’ efforts to evade school supplied recurring material: a sketch called “Fence-Breakers” imagined ways of skipping class after already entering the school grounds.[5] Among its jokes was a stubborn guard’s rejection of a student’s claim not to have eaten breakfast for three days.[5] At eighteen, Yehoshua wrote and performed “The Swan Song of the Chairs” for his school graduation.[5]

His first short story, “A Letter of Rains,” was probably written in 1953 or 1954.[5] Editor Aharon Meged recognized promise but objected to its close imitation of S. Y. Agnon, responding, “Yes, not bad, there’s something there, but how can one write in such complete imitation of Agnon?”[5] Agnon remained among the literary influences associated with Yehoshua, alongside Franz Kafka and William Faulkner.[3]

From 1954 to 1957, Yehoshua served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, including service in the 1956 Suez War.[6] Afterward, he studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[3] He began teaching in Jerusalem in 1962, then lived and taught in Paris from 1963 to 1967.[3] Returning to Israel in 1967, he fought in the Six-Day War.[3]

Yehoshua married Rivka Kirsninski, known as Ika, in 1960; she became a psychologist and psychoanalyst.[7][8] They had three children and seven grandchildren.[7] Haifa was his home for much of his adult life, and the city became an important setting in his fiction.[7][9] Later, he moved to Givatayim to live closer to his children.[7]

Yehoshua’s first collection of short stories, Mot Hazaken, translated as The Death of the Old Man, appeared in the early 1960s.[3][5] His early fiction established him among the new wave of Israeli writers, with an emphasis on individual experience and interpersonal relationships.[6] These stories combined realism and surrealism, psychological and political concerns, and recognizable Israeli settings with departures from ordinary time and place.[10] They also moved away from the ideological and patriotic emphases associated with some writers of Israel’s founding generation.[10]

His academic career developed alongside his writing: in 1972, he joined the University of Haifa as a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature.[3] He held a writer-in-residence appointment at Oxford’s St Cross College in 1975 and later visiting professorships at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Princeton.[6] He eventually became professor emeritus in the University of Haifa’s literature department.[9] His writing extended beyond fiction to plays, literary scholarship, journalism, and essays on Israeli society and Jewish identity.[1][9]

Facing the Forests, published in 1968, follows a depressed Israeli graduate student who becomes a forest ranger in woods covering the ruins of an Arab village.[11] An Arab servant who once lived in the village, and whose tongue was cut out during the War of Independence, eventually sets the forest on fire.[11] The ranger becomes a silent accomplice to the destruction.[8] The story entered the Israeli school curriculum and became one of Yehoshua’s influential symbolic narratives.[11]

In his critical appreciation in the Jewish Review of Books, Robert Alter treats Facing the Forests as part of a four-novella collection whose protagonists approach destructive or emotionally extreme behavior.[12] Alter identifies a comic imagination beneath these disturbing subjects, arguing that Yehoshua repeatedly combined deadpan humor with obsession, distress, and other grave experiences.[12] In Alter’s reading, this coexistence of comedy and danger was a defining feature rather than an incidental contrast.[12]

Alter illustrates that quality through “A Long Hot Day, His Despair, His Wife and His Daughter,” in which an Israeli engineer working in Africa becomes emotionally paralyzed after a teenage dancer sits in his lap during a ritual.[12] As Alter recounts the story, the engineer returns to Israel, becomes obsessively concerned with his daughter’s sexuality, and intercepts her boyfriend’s letters from military service.[12] Alter reads the increasingly bizarre behavior as dark comedy, culminating when the father accidentally breaks the boyfriend’s glasses with his car and waits for his wife while thinking, “This time she will really run him over.”[12]

Yehoshua’s first novel, The Lover, appeared in 1977 and was among the early works by an Israeli Jewish novelist to feature an Arab main character.[3] Set in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, it follows Adam, a middle-aged Israeli searching for his wife’s lover, who disappeared during the fighting.[13] Its overlapping voices include Naim, a young Arab boy from a nearby village, and expose family tensions, generational differences, and Jewish-Arab relationships.[13] Another strand concerns an Israeli living in France who returns to settle his grandmother’s estate, bringing the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora into the narrative.[11]

Alter singles out a Friday-night dinner scene in The Lover, when an Arab teenager encounters gefilte fish at his Jewish employer’s table.[12] In Alter’s interpretation, the unfamiliar sweetness makes the boy’s entry into another cultural world tangible through a small domestic incident.[12] Yehoshua later said that his father had taught him to portray Arab characters as equals, understanding them from within rather than treating them patronizingly or as objects of apology.[14]

A Late Divorce (1982) unfolds during the ten days before Passover, as an aging couple’s decision to separate unsettles their family.[13] Like The Lover, it uses differentiated voices and perspectives to construct a larger narrative.[13] Five Seasons centers on a Sephardi widower rebuilding his life after the death of his Ashkenazi wife.[11] These novels preceded Yehoshua’s sustained exploration of Sephardi family history in Mr. Mani.[4]

Published in 1990, Mr. Mani consists of five one-sided conversations, each presenting only one participant’s words and requiring readers to infer the unheard replies.[2][15] Its sequence moves backward from 1982 to Athens in 1848, with historical settings that include Jerusalem, Crete, and Poland.[2] The idea for its form developed from a chapter in A Late Divorce written as a dialogue in which only one voice could be heard.[2] Yehoshua wanted readers to “work” alongside the author by imagining the missing side of each exchange.[2]

Yehoshua connected the novel’s origins to his father’s funeral in December 1982, when the sight of the burial in the family plot on the Mount of Olives suggested a story about successive generations of a Sephardi family.[2] He imagined each generation transmitting a message, distortion, or unfulfilled mission to the next.[2] His father’s books about Jerusalem’s Sephardi communities supplied material he had previously kept at a distance, which he transformed into what he called an ideological and psychological epic.[2] He regarded Mr. Mani as his most important and complex novel.[2]

The novel attracted substantial attention from readers and literary scholars and became the first Israeli novel to receive an entire book of literary studies devoted to it.[2] Its exploration of Sephardi life also marked a renewed engagement with Yehoshua’s own family inheritance.[4] He later described its fifth monologue as reaching a depth of Sephardi-Mizrahi identity that connected his writing to the life and culture in which his father had raised him.[10]

A Journey to the End of the Millennium, published in 1997, extended that historical exploration through a Sephardi merchant traveling from Tangier to Europe with his two wives and Muslim business partner.[4] The narrative examines religious difference, intolerance, and relations between Sephardi and Ashkenazi worlds.[4] Alter describes its central conflict as the merchant Ben Attar’s attempt to resolve a dispute with his nephew’s Ashkenazi wife, who objects to his polygamy.[12] Alter reads the contrast in customs as the basis of a comic historical fantasy, while recalling Yehoshua’s insistence that the book was historically authentic and informed by medieval historians he knew.[12]

Yehoshua’s later novels included The Return from India, The Liberated Bride, A Woman in Jerusalem, Friendly Fire, The Tunnel, and The Only Daughter (2021).[6][7] A Woman in Jerusalem is known in Hebrew as The Mission of the Human Resources Manager.[6] He began writing plays in the late 1960s, published nonfiction books about Israeli life, Zionism, and writing from the 1980s onward, and produced children’s books in 2005 and 2007.[9]

The Retrospective, published in Hebrew in 2011, follows an elderly Israeli filmmaker traveling to Spain and revisiting his early creative relationships.[16] In his review in the Jewish Review of Books, Alan Mintz places it after Mr. Mani and A Journey to the End of the Millennium as the third work in a Sephardic trilogy.[16] Mintz interprets the collaboration and estrangement of the filmmaker and his North African Jewish creative team as an examination of Ashkenazi-Sephardi cultural difference.[16] He also identifies a broader career movement from early allegorical tales toward psychological realism, while arguing that larger meanings continued to accompany the fiction.[16]

In a review of The Tunnel, the Jewish Review of Books describes retired road engineer Zvi Luria confronting a brain abnormality expected to bring increasing memory loss.[15] The review recounts how his wife, Dinah, helps him return to engineering as a consultant on a Negev road project, where he proposes tunneling through a hill rather than demolishing it because a Palestinian family has taken refuge there.[15] It interprets the novel’s treatment of cognitive decline as simultaneously anxious and absurdly comic, with the family’s displacement and the road’s possible military purpose adding political implications.[15]

The same review describes the fictional family as a schoolteacher and his son and daughter, who fled after a land sale based on invalid Ottoman-era documents and the mother’s death while awaiting a heart transplant.[15] The family speaks Hebrew and resists a settled national classification; the father calls them “Nabateans,” invoking an ancient people associated with the hill.[15] The reviewer reads this play with names and belonging as part of the novel’s exploration of shifting identities.[15]

Yehoshua’s fiction reached audiences through cinema, television, theater, and opera.[10] Film adaptations included Three Days and a Child (1967), The Lover (1986), The Return from India (2002), and The Human Resources Manager (2010).[10] The latter three were directed respectively by Michal Bat-Adam, Menachem Golan, and Eran Riklis.[10] Ram Levi adapted Mr. Mani and The Late Divorce for television.[9] Yehoshua wrote the libretto for a 2005 opera based on A Journey to the End of the Millennium.[10]

In a 2022 interview, Yehoshua described writing as a means of inventing worlds through which he could investigate political and moral questions, remain curious, and change.[17] He did not describe the work as requiring withdrawal from family life: his study door stayed open, and his family could be present while he wrote.[17] In discussing Mr. Mani, he similarly linked literary investigation with psychological inquiry, joking that he sought to analyze the Jewish people collectively while his wife treated individual patients.[2]

Beyond literature, Yehoshua was active in Israel’s peace movement and belonged first to the Labor Party and later to Meretz.[9] He supported the Geneva Initiative, served on B’Tselem’s public council, and called for a ceasefire during the Second Lebanon War.[18] He explained his public interventions as a responsibility arising from being both an Israeli resident and a prominent cultural figure.[9] His writing criticized Israeli occupation of the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — as well as Palestinian violence.[3]

In “Jewish Identity Reconsidered,” an essay first published in an abridged form after a December 1995 Ha’aretz article, Yehoshua argued that Israeli identity rested on shared collective life, historical continuity, and a defined territory.[19] He maintained that the common threat of Arab-Jewish conflict had helped unite Israelis of different origins and religious outlooks, and warned that peace might weaken some values associated with defense, settlement, and immigration.[19] He therefore called for renewed dialogue between secular and national-religious communities, social justice, and a cultural pact between the Jewish majority and Arab minority within a Jewish state.[19]

That essay also advocated closer engagement with the Middle East and described Israel as “neither Oriental nor Western, but Mediterranean.”[19] In a later formulation, Yehoshua asked, “Nation of Israel, for what purpose do you live?”[20] He argued that Jewish life should be judged not solely by survival, but by the means through which survival was pursued, the values and agenda guiding it, and its costs.[20]

Before Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Yehoshua and Rabbi Menachem Fruman initiated a conference considering whether Gush Katif settlements could remain under Palestinian sovereignty.[21] Yehoshua supported allowing residents to stay with international guarantees, arguing that uprooting people and destroying homes, synagogues, and schools could traumatize Israeli society and become “a bar to future peacemaking.”[21] He reasoned that further territorial handovers might follow in later agreements, making it necessary to explore arrangements under which settlements could remain under Palestinian control.[21]

For decades, Yehoshua supported a two-state solution, but later concluded that settlement expansion had made separation into two states impracticable.[14] In 2016, he discussed a possible confederative model following an end to the occupation.[14] In his final years, he advocated a shared state in which Israelis and Palestinians would live together, while continuing to emphasize reconciliation and Palestinian inclusion in Israeli society.[6][12][17]

Yehoshua received the Israel Prize for Hebrew literature in 1995, following a succession of major Israeli literary honors.[6] These included the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literary Works in 1972, the Brenner Prize in 1983, the Alterman Prize in 1986, and the Bialik Prize in 1989.[6] His other distinctions included the ACUM Prize, the EMET Prize, and honorary doctorates from Israeli and overseas institutions.[22]

International recognition included National Jewish Book Awards in 1990 and 1993 and the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for A Woman in Jerusalem.[3] He also received Italy’s Giovanni Boccaccio and Viareggio prizes.[3] In 2012, the French translation of The Retrospective won the Prix Médicis étranger.[6] The Dan David Prize followed in 2017.[6] His prominence extended beyond literary institutions: a 2005 Israeli newspaper poll placed him seventy-seventh among the greatest Israelis of all time.[3]

His works were translated into dozens of languages and circulated through numerous forms of adaptation.[1][10] The breadth of this reception accompanied his standing within modern Hebrew literature, where his writing is studied in Israel’s high-school literature curriculum.[23] The curriculum includes works such as Facing the Forests and A Late Divorce.[23] His career joined an international readership to continuing engagement with the particular languages, social divisions, and historical experiences of Israeli life.[3][9]

Robert Alter recalled in the Jewish Review of Books that his friendship with Yehoshua began in 1969, after he published an article celebrating Yehoshua and Amos Oz as Hebrew fiction’s two most promising talents.[12] Alter remembered the writer, known to close friends as “Buli,” as spontaneous, passionate, warm, and generous, and described him as one of the most fascinating writers of the preceding several decades.[12] His critical appreciation emphasized the fiction’s ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and capacity for comedy.[12]

Alan Mintz likewise observed in the Jewish Review of Books that Yehoshua’s novels could provoke intense public debate in Israel.[16] Mintz noted sharply contrasting responses to The Retrospective from critic Avraham Balaban and scholar Dan Miron, illustrating the sustained critical attention that accompanied the novelist’s later work.[16] Yehoshua’s recovery of Sephardi history, particularly through Mr. Mani, also connected literary experimentation with the Jerusalem family inheritance that had shaped his childhood.[2]

Rivka Yehoshua died in 2016.[7] Yehoshua died of cancer on June 14, 2022, aged eighty-five.[1][6] His archive, spanning 1954–2022 and measuring fifty meters of material, preserves correspondence, manuscripts, printed works in Hebrew and other languages, interviews, personal documents, and writing about his work.[1] It also contains remnants of his father Ya’akov’s archive, bringing together records of the novelist’s career and part of the family scholarship that informed his fiction.[1][2]

Yehoshua’s claim that Jewish life in Israel produced a fuller identity than Diaspora life drew criticism from Jewish communities abroad.[4] At an American Jewish Committee symposium in May 2006, he said, “being Israeli is my skin, it’s not my jacket,” contrasting identity shaped within a sovereign state with Jewish identity outside Israel.[13] He also described Diaspora Jews as “partial Jews,” although he rejected the claim that he sought the negation of the Diaspora and acknowledged the long existence and likely continuation of communities outside Israel.[4]

His language about exile could be deliberately severe: he described its attraction as an “ancient genetic defect,” and characterized his Zionism as “aggressive and militant” in rejecting Diaspora existence rather than asserting territorial claims.[24][2] His 1980 essay collection In Favor of Normalcy included a particularly contentious argument assigning blame to Holocaust victims who had not emigrated to Eretz Yisrael.[19] These were his ideological judgments, not established historical conclusions.[19]

Other controversial interventions included urging the Israeli government to stop referring to Hamas as a terrorist organization.[6] His late support for a single Israeli-Palestinian state also drew objections: Robert Alter, writing in the Jewish Review of Books, challenged its practicality and contrasted the starkness of Yehoshua’s political pronouncements with the complexity of his fiction.[12]