YEHOSHUA, A(braham) B. 1936-

PERSONAL: Given name is sometimes spelled Avraham; born December 9, 1936, in Jerusalem, Israel; son of Yakov (an Orientalist) and Malka (Rosilio) Yehoshua; married Rivka Kirsninski (a psychoanalyst), June 14, 1960; children: Sivan, Gideon, Naum. Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, B.A., 1961; graduate of Teachers College, 1962. Politics: Labor. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—33 Shoshanat Ha-Carmel, Haifa, 34322, Israel. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. Hebrew University of Jerusalem High School, Jerusalem, Israel, teacher, 1961–63; Israeli School, Paris, France, director, 1963–64; World Union of Jewish Students, Paris, secretary-general, 1964–67; Haifa University, Haifa, Israel, dean of students, 1967–71, senior lecturer, 1971–77, professor of literature, beginning in 1977, now retired. Lecturer on tour of American college and university campuses, 1969; visiting fellow, St. Cross College, Oxford, 1975–76; visiting professor, Harvard University, 1977, University of Chicago, 1988, and Princeton University, 1992. Member of board of art, Haifa Municipal Theatre. Military service: Israeli Army, paratrooper in Nachal unit, 1954–57.

AWARDS, HONORS: Akum Prize, 1961; second prize in Kol-Yisrael Competition, 1964, for radio script, The Professor's Secret; Municipality of Ramat-Gan Prize, 1968, for short story collection, Mul ha-ye'arot; University of Iowa fellow in international literature program, 1969; Prime Minister Prize, 1972; Brener Prize, 1982; Alterman Prize, 1986; Bialik Prize, 1988; National Jewish Book Award, 1990 and 1993; Three Days and a Child was chosen to represent Israel at the Cannes Film Festival; Israel Prize, 1995; Koret Prize, 2000; Napoli Prize, 2003; Lampeduza Prize, 2003; Buccacio Prize, 2005.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Mot ha-zaken (title means "The Death of an Old Man"), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel) 1962.

Mul ha-ye'arot (short story collection; title means "Over against the Woods"), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1968.

Three Days and a Child (short story collection), translation by Miriam Arad, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1970.

Early in the Summer of 1970 (novella), Schocken (New York, NY), 1972.

Until Winter (short story collection), Hakibbutz, 1974.

Me'ahev (novel), Shoken (Jerusalem, Israel), 1977, translation by Philip Simpson published as The Lover, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1977.

Gerushim me'uharim (novel), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel) 1982, translation by Hillel Halkin published as A Late Divorce, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1984, revised edition published as Kantatat ha-gerushim (title means "Divorce Cantata"), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1991.

Molkho (novel), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel) 1987, translation by Halkin published as Five Seasons, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1989.

The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Short Stories of A. B. Yehoshua, Penguin (New York, NY), 1991.

Mar Mani (novel), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel) 1990, translation by Halkin published as Mr. Mani, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1992.

Kol ha-sipurim (short story collection), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel) 1993.

Open Heart, translated by Dalya Bilu, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1996.

Masa el tom ha-elef: Roman bi-Sheloshah Halakim, ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel) 1997, translation by Nicholas De Lange published as A Journey to the End of the Millennium, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2000.

Hatunatah shel Galya (title means "Galia's Wedding"; short story collection), Keter (Jerusalem, Israel), 2000.

The Liberating Bride, Ha-Kala Ha-Meshachreret, 2001 published as The Liberated Bride, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2004.

PLAYS

A Night in May (also see below), translation by Miriam Arad, Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1974.

Two Plays: A Night in May and Last Treatments (A Night in May was produced in Tel Aviv by the Bimot Theatre, 1969 and Last Treatments was produced in Haifa, Israel, by the Haifa Theatre), Schocken, 1974.

Hafatsim (title means "Possessions"), produced by the Haifa Theatre, Shoken, 1986.

Tinokot lailah: Mahazeh bi-shete ma'arakhot (title means "Night's Babies"; produced by the Habima National Theatre), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1992.

NONFICTION

Bi-zekhut ha-normaliyut, Shoken (Jerusalem, Israel), 1980, translation by Arnold Schwartz published as Between Right and Right, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1981.

Israel, photos by Frederic Brenner, translation by Simpson, Harper (New York, NY), 1988.

Hakir V-H-Har (title means "The Wall and the Mountain"; collection of political essays), Zmora Bitan (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1989.

Kohah ha-nora shel ashmah ketanah: Ha-Heksher ha-Musari shel ha-tekst ha-sifruti (essays), Yedi ot aharonot (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1998, translation by Ora Cummings published as The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 2000.

OTHER

Ad horef 1974: Mivhar, ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel) 1975.

Ha-Shivah me-Hodu: Roman be-arba ah halakim (title means "Return from India"), ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel) 1994.

Also author of Mai-erev, lailah ve-shahar: Mahazeh/Rishumim: Dani Karavan, Bimot (Tel Aviv, Israel), Shelosha yamin ve-yeled, ha-Mahlakah (Jerusalem), and Shene Sipurim, ha-Mahlakah. Author of the play Israeli Babies, 1991, and the radio script The Professor's Secret. Member of editorial board, Keshet, 1965–72, Siman Kria, 1973–, and Tel Aviv Review, 1987–. Adviser to drama editorial board, Israeli Television Network. Yehoshua's works have been translated into fourteen languages, including Korean, Japanese, and Swedish.

ADAPTATIONS: Three Days and a Child and Early in the Summer of 1970 have been adapted as films.

SIDELIGHTS: A. B. Yehoshua is "generally regarded as Israel's best living novelist," wrote Alan Mintz in a review of A Journey to the End of the Millennium in Commentary. In his novels and short stories, Yehoshua deals in fictional form with the political and moral questions that have arisen out of Zionism, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. His early short stories were in many cases surrealistic and allegorical. In a review of Early in the Summer of 1970, the New York Times's Anatole Broyard called Yehoshua's stories "a brilliant evocation of one face of life in Israel," namely, the tension between the generation of Israelis born in Europe who fled from Nazism and the generation which, like Yehoshua himself, was born in the state of Israel.

Yehoshua's first novel, The Lover, was controversial in Israel because of its criticisms of Israeli society—its "disappointment with the dream's implementation," in the words of Midstream contributor Nili Wachtel. One of the novel's main characters, the old woman Veducha, suffering in a hospital from degenerative diseases, symbolizes the distortion of Zionism by "messianic" aims, according to Wachtel. He summarized: "Yehoshua's greatest disappointment … [is] that it [Israeli society] lives in Zion like a lover from afar."

A Late Divorce, Yehoshua's second novel, examines questions about the Diaspora, the worldwide Jewish exile. The main character, Yehuda Kaminka, is an Israeli intellectual who has moved to Minneapolis. He must return to Israel briefly to obtain his wife's consent to a divorce so that he can marry his pregnant American girlfriend. Kaminka's nine-day return is narrated in Faulknerian style by a series of different relatives and by Kaminka himself. Harold Bloom, in the New York Times Book Review, noted that A Late Divorce is "authentic storytelling, acutely representative of current social realities in Israel and marked by extraordinary psychological insight throughout." In the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier praised the ambitious scale and subject of the novel and called the series of monologues "brilliant," commenting that the only ingredient the novel lacks is "transcendence."

In Five Seasons, Yehoshua explores the life of his main character, Molkho, in five chapters, each of which is set in a specific season and concerns Molkho's psychological relationship with a woman. Beginning with the death of Molkho's wife from cancer in autumn, it ends as his mother-in-law is dying in a later autumn. Tova Reich, in the Washington Post Book World, observed that "the novel comes together in Molkho's struggle to snatch some illumination and release from death." Reich asserts that Yehoshua's effort is "a wonderfully engaging, exquisitely controlled, luminous work." Bryan Cheyette, in the Times Literary Supplement, maintained that the novel is "a series of delightful set-pieces" that because of its facile comedy, could not, in the reviewer's opinion, sustain its more ambitious themes.

Mr. Mani, Yehoshua's next novel, covers six generations of Jewish history, from 1848 to 1982, through the medium of five separate conversations that go backward chronologically. It "spirals in upon the origins of Israel's current malaise, offering a kaleidoscopic view of Jewish history filtered through the events of one family," in the words of the New York Times Book Review's Jay Parini. Explaining his method in an interview with the New York Times Book Review's Laurel Graeber, Yehoshua stated that the novel is "intergenerational psychoanalysis," adding: "I wanted to understand the present by digging through the layers of the past." Mark Miller, in the Chicago Tribune Books, declared that Mr. Mani "takes on serious issues of Judaism, understanding it as more than a trial run for Zionism."

Yehoshua turned away from contemporary society in A Journey to the End of the Millennium, an historical novel set in the year 999. In this complex story of a medieval merchant's travels and marriages, Yehoshua illuminates a rich moment in Jewish history. The main character, Ben Attar, is a wealthy merchant who works in partnership with his nephew, Abulafia. Their lucrative teaming is threatened when Ben Attar takes a second wife, a custom approved of in his North African Jewish community but unheard of in the European communities from which Abulafia's wife has come. She renounces her husband's uncle, which spurs him to begin a journey to her homeland in the hopes of converting the Jews there to his way of thinking. In his review in Commentary, Mintz noted that during the era in which the story is set, "contrary to many of our own received historical notions, the rage of the nations against the Jews was a less burning issue than the differences of the Jews among themselves. And indeed the best part of this novel lies in its evocation of the disparate worlds of its Jewish characters: the vividly colored robes and veils of the southern visitors and their worldly brand of piety against the marshy drabness of the Rhineland towns whose Jews wear peculiar horn-shaped hats and practice a more pinched form of religion." Mintz advised that "despite the exotic spell cast by Yehoshua's writing, we are never unaware that this novel, like all historical novels, is in the end not really about history, or at least not about history of the dead-and-buried kind. Contemporary Israel and its own fraught brand of identity politics is never far from the surface."

In his native Israel, Yehoshua's short stories are as well known as his novels. His collected works first appeared in English in 1991 in The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Stories of A. B. Yehoshua. Francine Prose, reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review, noted that she is "struck by its daring absence of authorial vanity and self-protection." She divides the stories into two genres—realistic stories of urban Israelis, and "parablelike fictions with metaphysical and political overtones." "At its best," Prose concluded, "The Continuing Silence of a Poet makes us feel we are seeing ourselves at the first moment of awakening, before we've had time to reinvent the face we show to the world."

The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt contains essays about a wide gamut of writers who span the centuries. They include Euripedes, Old Testament authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Albert Camus, and Raymond Carver. In his examination of the authors and their works, Yehoshua delves into a variety of moral and social issues, including love, desire, and guilt. For example, in his examination of Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily," Yehoshua reads the story as being about Emily's relationship with the local people. "The reader and the townspeople revere Emily for her aristocratic behavior and conspire to maintain the social and emotional distance between her and themselves," wrote World Literature Today contributor Eric Sterling about Yehoshua's reading of the story. "They also repress their knowledge of her refusal to accept death because of their adherence to Southern values." Sterling went on to note that in his essays the author "provides insightful commentary regarding morality in literature." Writing in the Library Journal, Gene Shaw noted that "Yehoshua's close reading and moral commitment makes this an invaluable work." In a review in Shofar, Naomi Sokoloff wrote: "This is a highly readable book, whose spirited writing invites spirited response on the part of its readers."

In his novel The Liberated Bride, Yehoshua tells the story of an Israeli historian's attempt to unravel two dilemmas: the reasons behind his son's divorce and the reasons behind the troubles in Algeria following the civil war of 1990. The historian, named Rivlin, delves into Algeria by studying published works and by speaking with an Algerian student who is ultimately killed. In an interview with Queen's Quarterly contributor Elaine Kalman Naves, Yehoshua explained why he focused on Algeria as part of the plot for his book, noting, "I was a little bit shocked, like everyone else, over the past ten years at all this violence in Algeria. And I was asking, What are the sources of this violence? And none of the experts could give me an answer. So I tried to give it as an academic question to Rivlin." In the novel, Rivlin's search for the reasons behind his son's failed marriage leads him to a Jerusalem hotel owned by his ex-daughter-in-law's family and in which Rivlin suspects something happened that is at the root of the divorce, a suspicion confirmed later through an encounter with his son's ex-wife.

Commenting on The Liberated Bride in her Queen's Quarterly article, Naves called it "a sprawling, immensely moving, hugely entertaining and provocative novel of ideas, action, and tragically missed opportunities." A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that the novel is "[a] splendidly realized search for the causes of ruptures that rend families and nations: both timely and timeless." Another reviewer, writing in Publishers Weekly, stated that the author is "a keen observer of social and political realities, and a subtle writer." The reviewer went on to call the novel a "quietly provocative and deeply important consideration of how the desire for liberation … is inescapable in human nature." Tova Reich, writing in the New Leader, commented that "it is the search for truth that palpably pulls together the trajectory of his narrative and its conception." In a review in the Library Journal, Robert E. Brown wrote: "This is a great read from one of Israel's premier authors, by turns profoundly funny and simply profound."

Yehoshua told CA: "I think that my earliest sources [of entertainment] were De Amici's collection of short stories, The Heart, which were read to me by my father. When I was a child there was no television and we rarely went to the cinema. Thus the stories that were read to me were my only inspiration. My father had an implacable albeit somewhat sentimental literary taste, and he cherished reading these sad tales to me.

"As he was reading the stories I would totally identify with the suffering of the hero and would wallow in tears. My family used to make fun of my emotional outbursts; especially when I cried anew every time a story was retold. I had to fabricate fresh pretexts for my emotional upheaval: an insult inflicted by a sister, the pain caused by a recent fall and so on.

"It seemed to me then that the ability of a writer to generate emotions in readers by means of a fictional tale was a most wondrous gift; and since I did not lack in imagination, I said to myself: 'I'll give it a try.'

"I read much and learned a lot from many books. As I was a lecturer at the university for many years, where I interpreted many excellent texts to my students, I was fortunate to learn from each text something valuable which permeated my own writings. I have never tried to conceal the traces of such influences. I believe that culture is an open system. Being affected is not a sign of weakness. What is important is to let yourself be influenced by worthwhile works of art and to internalize them fully before you adapt them into your own writing.

"Amongst the writers whose works have been a fruitful source of inspiration to me I always mention Shay Agnon, Faulkner, Camus and Kafka. I have learned something different and important from each of them.

"I view myself as a writer who usually has a preconceived structure on which the work evolves. At a very early stage, after I identify the psychological and ideological core of the work, I begin to plan its structure. Mr. Mani's structure was conceived in the course of a single night, and the same is true for many of my other books. Normally I know where the work is heading and how it will end, shortly after I begin writing. I then decide on the structural details, i.e. how many chapters the book will have and how the story will divide into them.

"Once the framework is complete, and the direction of the story is more or less clear, creative freedom takes over: the characters take on a life of their own and events begin to develop organically. When I am sure of the structure, the correct 'musical key' begins to clarify in the course of writing the first chapter. Styling the first chapter (usually the first thirty pages), typically takes me a quarter of the time it takes to write the whole novel, as I am painstakingly looking for the correct 'tone' of the work.

"I must admit that I have often been surprised as a writer. Let me recount one: in my book Open Heart, I planned for the hero, Benji, to commit suicide at the end of the novel because Dori, an older woman with whom he had fallen in love, rejected him for good. Several major nineteenth century novels end with the suicide of the rejected heroine, and I felt that it was appropriate, at the end of the twentieth century, for at least one man to commit suicide because of scorned love. However, as I neared the end of the novel, I sensed that benji was not ready to commit suicide. He strongly opposed his preconceived destiny and would not take his life in a credible fashion. I could have used my authorial rights to force him, but as I did not endow him with sufficient self destructive forces early in the novel, he was not ripe for suicide. And so his mother appeared and began to accompany him so as to prevent him from commiting suicide. It was then that I realized that sometimes a fictional character may be stronger than its creator.

"The two books I am fond of above all others are Mr. Mani and Molcho. These books were written close to one another, at the end of the eighties, but their poetics are very different. As far as I know in Mr. Mani I used an entirely original form. The novel is composed of five conversations, at five historical juncture. The five dialogues follow the chronology of one family: the Manis. In these conversations only one side of the dialogue is 'heard' while the other one must be guessed. This is an ecstatic novel with a wide epic historical span combining personal and national perspectives. Upon its publication the novel was followed by a surge of research papers.

"Molcho, on the other hand, is a most intimate novel, told in the third person. It describes one year in the life of an accountant in the ministry of interior affairs. In this year he mourns the death of his wife who has just died after a long battle with cancer. Even though the topic is gloomy, and the hero is anything but a comic man, the book makes me laugh every time I read it. It seems that the juxtaposition between conscious and unconscious has succeeded in this novel, and has endowed it with a certain depth. This must be one of the reasons why it has become a favorite amongst my more discerning readers."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 13, 1980, Volume 31, 1985.

Horn, Bernard, Facing the Fires: Conversations with A. B. Yehoshua, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1997.

Itzjaki, Yedidya, ha-Pesukim ha-semuyim min ha-ayin: al yetsirat A. B. Yehoshua, Universitat Bar-Ilan (Ramat-Gan), 1992.

Trevisan Semi, Emanuela, Morte del senso e sense dalla morte nel primo racconto di A. B. Yehoshua, Guitina (Florence, Italy), 1989.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 1996, Nancy Pearl, review of Open Heart, p. 1490.

Commentary, July, 1999, Alan Mintz, review of A Journey to the End of the Millennium, p. 84; April, 2004, Hillel Halkin, "Politics and the Israeli Novel," p. 29.

Entertainment Weekly, November 7, 2003, Michael Endelman, review of The Liberated Bride, p. 74.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2003, review of The Liberated Bride, p. 1100.

Library Journal, February 15, 1992, Gene Shaw, review of Mr. Mani, p. 199; May 1, 1996, Ann Irvine, review of Open Heart, p. 135; September 15, 2000, Gene Shaw, review of The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt, p. 78; November 1, 2003, Robert E. Brown, review of The Liberated Bride, p. 127.

Midstream, August-September, 1979, Nili Wachtel, pp. 48-54.

Nation, June 15, 1992, Ted Solotaroff, review of Mr. Mani, p. 826; July 5, 2004, Jonathan Shainin, "Scenes from a Marriage," p. 47.

New Leader, November-December, 2003, Tova Reich, review of The Liberated Bride, p. 32.

New Republic, June 29, 1992, Alan Mintz, review of Mr. Mani, p. 41; March 15, 1999, Robert Alter, review of A Journey to the End of the Millennium, p. 38.

New Statesman, April 9, 1993, Stephen Brook, review of Mr. Mani, p. 54.

New York Review of Books, November 5, 1992, John Bayley, review of Mr. Mani, p. 18; June 24, 1999, review of A Journey to the End of the Millennium, p. 24.

New York Times, February 4, 1977, Anatole Broyard, review of Early in the Summer of 1970.

New York Times Book Review, February 19, 1984, Harold Bloom, review of A Late Divorce, pp. 1, 31; January 29, 1989, pp. 1, 36; May 26, 1991, Francine Prose, review of The Continuing Silence of a Poet, p. 8; March 1, 1992, Jay Parini, review of Mr. Mani, p. 3; March 1, 1993, Laurel Graeber, "Six Generations in Search of an Author," 3; June 2, 1996, Alan Mintz, review of Open Heart, p. 15; June 24, 1999, James E. Young, review of A Journey to the End of the Millennium, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, January 1, 1992, review of Mr. Mani, p. 46; March 9, 1992, p. 37; March 18, 1996, review of Open Heart, p. 57; November 23, 1998, review of A Journey to the End of the Millennium, p. 59; September 15, 2003, review of The Liberated Bride, p. 40.

Queen's Quarterly, spring, 2005, Elaine Kalman Naves, "Talking with A. B. Yehoshua," p. 76.

Shofar, spring, 2002, Naomi Sokoloff, review of The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt, p. 137; spring, 2004, review of The Liberated Bride, p. 201.

Times Literary Supplement, October 6, 1989, review of Five Seasons; p. 1103.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 1, 1992, Mark Miller, review of Mr. Mani, section 14, pp. 7, 11.

Washington Post Book World, February 5, 1989, Tova Reich, review of Five Seasons.

World Literature Today, winter, 2001, Eric Sterling, review of The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt, p. 194.

ONLINE

Shma.com, http://www.shma.com/ (September 1, 2005), interview with Yehoshua.