A.B. Yehoshua – författare

From the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Israeli author, a stunning novel that brilliantly illuminates a young girl's crisis of faith and coming of age in Padua, Italy.Rachele Luzzato is twelve years old when she learns her father is gravely ill. While her family plans for her upcoming Bat-Mitzvah, Rachele finds herself cast as the Madonna in her schools Christmas play. Caught between spiritual poles, struggling to cope with her fathers mortality, Rachele feels as if the threads of her everyday life are unravelling.A diverse circle of adults are there to guide young Rachele as she faces the difficult passing of childhood, including her charismatic Jewish grandfather, her maternal Catholic grandparents, and even an old teacher who believes the young girl might find solace in a nineteenth-century novel. These spiritual tributaries ultimately converge in Rachele's imagination, creating a fantasy that transcends the microcosm of her daily life with one simple hope: an end to the loneliness felt by an only daughter.In this wondrous story that combines the piercing wisdom of Nicole Krausss The History of Love, the poignancy of Elena Ferrantes My Brilliant Friend; and the magical flight of Aimee Benders The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, A. B. Yehoshua paints a warm and subtle portrait of a young girl at the cusp of her journey into adulthood.

A “spryly amusing [and] deeply affecting” novel of a Tel Aviv family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).A National Jewish Book Award FinalistUntil recently, Zvi Luria was a healthy man in his seventies, an engineer living in Tel Aviv with his wife, Dina, visiting with their two children whenever possible. Now he is showing signs of early dementia, and his work on the tunnels of the Trans-Israel Highway is no longer possible. To keep his mind sharp, Zvi decides to take a job as the unpaid assistant to Asael Maimoni, a young engineer involved in a secret military project: a road to be built inside the massive Ramon Crater in the northern Negev Desert.The challenge of the road, however, is compounded by strange circumstances. Living secretly on the proposed route, amid ancient Nabatean ruins, is a Palestinian family under the protection of an enigmatic archaeological preservationist. Zvi rises to the occasion, proposing a tunnel that would not dislodge the family. But when his wife falls sick, circumstances begin to spiral . . .Wry, wistful, and a tour de force of vital social commentary, this is “a fabulous portrayal of a long marriage . . . a novel so intimate and vivid that past and present and future merge in ways that generate surprise and delight” (The Arts Fuse).“The Tunnel — translated smoothly from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman—is about how one couple copes with the initial news that from now on, everything is going to be different.” —The New York Times Book Review

Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife's distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour, and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life.A.B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world (from North Africa to Paris, from Spain to Germany) with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man's love is lyrical, erotic even.

Brings together all the novellas and short stories including two sories not previously published in English.

Six generations of the Sephardi Mani family are chronicled in thisprofound and passionate Mediterranean epic, which moves backwardsfrom the 1980s to the mid-nineteenth century. The story comprises of five conversations, each centering on the fate of adifferent member of the Mani family, and in each the responses of oneperson are absent.Mr. Mani is surprisingly humorous, full of extraordinary historicalperspectives, and deeply wise and compassionate. It is an imaginativetour-de-force.

Professor Yohanan Rivlin has two obsessions, the first and most ambitious, is to understand the Arab mind - no mean feat in itself though perhaps made easier by the fact that he lives and works with Israeli Arabs. The second - and more personal, though equally hard to grasp - is to understand the failure of his elder son's marriage. Rivlin's two quests lead him to extraordinary - and at times highly entertaining - encounters with very disparate people, where the personal becomes intertwined with the political, as he searches out the truth both in politics and life.

A husband seeks his wife's lover who is lost in the turbulence of Israel's Yom Kippur War. As the story of his quest unfolds and grows in intensity, the main protagonists are drawn into the search and are transformed by it: through the different perspectives of husband, wife, teenage daughter, and young Arab emerges a complex picture of the uneasy present, the tension between generations, between Israel's past and future, between Jews and Arabs. 'We see an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity, alikeness, mental hatred, that Yehoshua's superb ability to render both presences relieves of all sentimentality. What I value most in The Lover is a gift for equidistance - between characters, even between the feelings on both sides.'Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books

In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies. His years of loving care have ended and his newfound freedom proves unlike the one he had imagined. It is uneasy, filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love, but whose longing for meaningful relationships is held hostage by the spirit of his wife.Winter sees him in Berlin in a comic encounter with a legal adviser from his office in Haifa. Spring takes him to the Galilee and an impossible infatuation. Jerusalem in the summer brings another man's wife and an extraordinary request. And the following autumn there is Nina whose yearning for her Russian home brings Molkho back to life.'In this finely observed and oddly moving comic novel¿Yehoshua makes us feel [Molkho's] humanity - and deftly wins him our sympathy.' Kirkus

Yehuda Kaminka, a retired teacher, returns to Israel from the U.S. to divorce his estranged wife who is in a mental asylum, having tried to kill him a few years earlier. The impending divorce of their parents throws into turmoil the lives of the couple's three children and grandson, revealing the complexity of their relationships. Yehuda's nine days, leading up to Passover, are remembered by different members of the family: A.B. Yehoshua's brilliance reveals itself in these different voices, each a minor masterpiece.A picture slowly emerges of what happened as memories are revived, hopes expressed and dreams articulated. The narrative gathers pace as Yehuda's visit draws to an end and he changes his mind about the divorce agreement.

A husband and wife spend a week apart over the Hanukkah holiday: Daniela visits her widowed brother-in-law in Africa to revive memories of her sister with him but, in ways she cannot begin to understand, he has been left wounded and raging after an earlier tragedy - a death by friendly fire. Her husband, Amotz Ya'ari, stays behind in Israel, rushing between his engineering company, their grandchildren and his father. Life in the Ya'ari family is full, complicated and humorous, but beyond it lies a fragile society deeply uneasy with itself and badly scarred, with each family harbouring its own ghosts.Ever-creative, A.B. Yehoshua's short, interwoven chapters create a duet-like narrative which penetrates deeply into human relationships and taps into the psyche of his country.

A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims is a migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the bakery where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies unclaimed in the morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and inhuman by a local journalist. The manager of human resources is given the task of discovering who she was and why she had come to Jerusalem.As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to obsess him, the manager turns this duty into a personal mission - he is no longer just saving his company's reputation by trying to discover her identity and assure her of a dignified funeral. He is now restoring her not only to her family and country but also to common humanity - whilst at the same time conquering the hardness of his own heart."There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and powerful scenes - of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the purging of body and soul."Carole Angier, The Independent

Life in the Ya'ari family is full, complicated and often humorous, but beyond it lies a fragile society deeply uneasy with itself and badly scarred, with each family harbouring its own ghosts.Ever-creative, A.B. Yehoshua's short, interwoven chapters create a duet-like narrative which penetrates deeply into human relationships. He taps into the psyche of the reader as he taps into the psyche of his country, and we emerge altered by what we have read. "Yehoshua ... has been one of his country's most vital chroniclers and critics." Ethan Bronner, The New York Times Book Review "Yehoshua has long been praised for his Faulknerian novels and though the two rather unexceptional middle class Israeli families in Friendly Fire lack the gothic appurtenances of the Snopeses and Compsons, his story is not short on sound and fury." Eric Banks, Financial Times "None of Yehoshua's books, no matter how personal, is without political, historical and religious importance. Friendly Fire is no exception." Haaretz

Now an award-winning feature film The Human Resources Manager A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims is a migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the bakery where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies unclaimed in the morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and inhuman by a local journalist. The manager of human resources is given the task of discovering who she was and why she had come to Jerusalem. As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to obsess him, the manager turns this duty into a personal mission - he is no longer just saving his company''s reputation by trying to discover her identity and assure her of a dignified funeral. He is now restoring her not only to her family and country but also to common humanity - whilst at the same time conquering the hardness of his own heart.

Yochanan Rivlin, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Haifa University, is determined to understand two conflicts that have become central to his life: the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, which he feels will help him better understand the Arab mind and, more personally, his son''s divorce. His is a double search for truth, each involving a different bride-Samaher, his newly-wed Arab research assistant from a village in the Galilee, and Galya, who deserted his son in Jerusalem with no explanation. Against his wife''s better judgment, Rivlin tries obsessively to get to the core of both problems, crossing boundaries at once personal and political-man and wife, father and son, teacher and pupil, Jew and Arab. With equal measures of energy, humour, anxiety, and poetry, Yehoshua portrays a life sometimes improbable, often dark, and infinitely rich. The Liberated Bride is a feat of masterly storytelling from one of the world''s great novelists. "The Liberated Bride seethes with emotions, dreams, ideas, humor, pathos, all against a backdrop of violence, conflict, and terror." The Sun (New York) "Yehoshua seeks to present two worlds, those of Israel''s Jewish majority and its Arab minority. He has done it rather as Tolstoy wrote of war and peace: two novels, in a sense, yet intimately joined. Paradoxically -and paradox…is the book''s engendering force -the war is mainly reflected in the zestfully intricate quarrels in the Jewish part of the novel. The peace largely flowers when Rivlin finds himself breaking through the looking glass into the Arab story." Richard Eder, The New York Times "The Liberated Bride is tinged with the kind of innate, unavoidable suspense that the threat of bus bombs brings." Herald Tribune "The boundaries that are broken down in The Liberated Bride include those within the self and others; mystical boundaries between self and God; political and cultural boundaries and finally, the stylistic boundaries of the novel itself, which Yehoshua is constantly stretching in different directions." International Jerusalem Post "A splendidly realized search for the causes of ruptures that rend families and nations: both timely and timeless." Kirkus Review

Five conversations, each centring on the fate of a different member of the Sephardi Mani family, make up this profound, far-reaching and passionate Mediterranean novel which tells of six generations of the family, but in reverse chronology. In each conversation the responses of one person are absent, thus drawing in the reader as the story reaches back into the past, creating one of the most extraordinary reading experiences in modern literature. On a kibbutz in the Negev in 1982, a student tells her mother about her strange meeting in Jerusalem with Judge Gavriel Mani, the father of her boyfriend whose child she is expecting. On the occupied island of Crete in 1944, a German soldier relates to his adoptive grandmother his experiences there with the Mani family, whom he hunts down. In Jerusalem, occupied by the British in 1918, a young Jewish lawyer serving with the British army briefs his commanding officer on the forthcoming trial for treason of the political agitator Yosef Mani. In a village in southern Poland in 1899, a young doctor reports to his father his experiences at the Third Zionist Congress and his subsequent trip to Jerusalem with his sister, who falls in love with Dr Moshe Mani, an obstetrician. In Athens, in 1848, Avraham Mani reports to his elderly mentor the intricate tale of his trip to Jerusalem and the death there of his young son. ''Mr Mani is conceived on an epic scale as a hymn to the continuity of Jewish life. This formulation sounds pat and sentimental, but Yehoshua''s achievement is the opposite: it always suggests even more complex worlds beyond the vignettes of which the novel is composed. ''Stephen Brook, New Statesman and Society ''Suffused with sensuous receptiveness to Jerusalem -its coppery light, its pungent smells, its babble of tongues, its vistas crumbling with history -Yehoshua''s minutely researched novel ramifies out from the city to record the rich and wretched elements that have gone into the founding and continuation of the nation whose centre it has once again become. ''Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times ''Adjectives come racing to mind to describe Mr Mani, for instance ''rich, complex, exotic, creative, informative'', but ''easy'' is one that does not fit. On finishing it, this reader had the reaction that he had to turn back to the beginning in order to grasp more firmly the sources of his admiration...It is extraordinarily skilful to have captured the Jewish mixture of suffering and revival, despair and messianic hope, without in any way spelling out such heavy themes. ''David Pryce-Jones, The Financial Times ''A.B. Yehoshua has created a historical and psychological universe -nearly biblical in the range and penetration of its enchanting ''begats'' -with an amazingly real Jerusalem at its centre. It is as if the blood-pulse of this ingeniously inventive novel had somehow fused with the hurtling vision of the generations of Genesis. With Mr. Mani, Yehoshua once again confirms his sovereign artistry; and Hillel Halkin''s translation has a brilliant and spooky life of its own. ''Cynthia Ozick

A husband seeks his wife''s lover who is lost in the turbulence of Israel''s Yom Kippur War. As the story of his quest unfolds and grows in intensity, the main protagonists are drawn into the search and transformed by it: through the different perspective of husband, wife, teenage daughter, young Arab emerges a complex picture of the uneasy present, the tension between generations, between Israel''s past and future, between Jews and Arabs. The Lover was A.B. Yehoshua''s first novel and immediately brought him international recognition. It is brilliant, compassionate and highly original and as accomplished as all his later works.

Yehuda Kaminka, a retired teacher, returns to Israel from the U.S. to divorce his estranged wife who was committed to a mental asylum after she stabbed him. This impending divorce inevitably throws into turmoil the couple''s three children and grandson. Yehuda''s nine days, leading up to Passover, are remembered by different members of the family: A.B. Yehoshua''s brilliance reveals itself in these different voices, each a minor masterpiece.

In the autumn, Molkho''s wife dies. His years of loving care have ended and his newfound freedom proves unlike the one he had imagined. It is an uneasy freedom, filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love, but whose longing for meaningful relationships is held hostage by the spirit of his wife. Five Seasons is a subtle and often comic novel about love and renewal, and the determination of a seasoned heart to love.

Open Heart is a psychological tour de fource about love and the nature of man''s soul. From the opening lines of this first-person narrative, the reader is propelled into the mind of Dr. Benjamin Rubin, an ambitious young internist, who is jockeying for position with the hospital''s top surgeons. But it isn''t until Benjy learns that his position has been terminated, and that he has been selected to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife to India to retrieve their ailing daughter, that Yehoshua sets his hero on a journey of self-discovery.

The year is 999 A.D. Christians in Europe are preparing themselves for the arrival of the Messiah at the millennium and religious fervour is in the air. Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife''s distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life. A confrontation ensues between people of different cultures whose ways of living and loving are so different, and yet who are of the same religion, believe in the same God and in the same morality. Thus we enter a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate deeply with our times. A. B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man''s love is lyrical, erotic even, and A Journey to the End of the Millennium will rank with the best of Yehoshua''s work.

An ageing film director named Yair Moses has been invited to the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Campostela for a retrospective of his early work. As he and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, settle into their hotel, Moses notices the painting over his bed depicting a classical legend of an old prisoner nursing at the breast of a young woman. For the first time in decades, he recalls the infamous scene from one of his early films which led to his estrangement from his difficult but brilliant screenwriter, Trigano, who was also Ruth's former lover.Throughout the retrospective, Moses is unsettled, straddling the past and the present, and upon his return to Israel, he decides to find the elusive Trigano and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for such a reconciliation, one that will have strange and lasting consequences.Searching, intellectual, and original, The Retrospective is a probing meditation on mortality, the limits of memory, and the struggle of artistic creation by one of the world's most esteemed writers.

An ageing film director, Yair Moses, has been invited to the Spanish pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela to attend a retrospective of his early work. As he and Ruth, his leading actress and former muse, settle into their room at the parador, Moses notices a painting depicting the classical story of an elderly prisoner nursing at the breast of a young woman. For the first time in decades, Moses recalls a similar scene from one of his early films, which led to his dramatic estrangement from his screenwriter, Trigano. Trigano''s spirit haunts the retrospective, as the director and actress re-live each film. They question artistic decisions and are surprised at how differently each remembers the past, slowly revealing to each other past reasons for decisions taken at the time. A troubled Moses decides to seek out the elusive Trigano to settle their differences, and to propose a new collaboration. But the reluctant screenwriter demands an outrageous price for this reconciliation: Moses must commit to a deeply disturbing act of atonement. Ultimately, reality and the sublime mingle when Moses has an epiphany, as he nears the end of his quest and the source of his imagination. Searching, witty and trenchant, this work by an internationally respected and original writer is a meditation on the roots of artistic inspiration, the limits and the truth of memory, and the struggle for artistic creation.

An experiment is under way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a woman, recently widowed, is starting a trial period in assisted living, mainly to placate her over-anxious son, whilst in Jerusalem her daughter Noga, a young harpist, returns from her job with a Dutch orchestra to look after the family apartment.To enliven her stay, Noga's brother finds work for her - playing roles as an extra in film, TV, and in the opera Carmen. The random roles Noga is thrust into resonate strangely with her own life which she begins to re-evaluate. Central to her past is the fact that she refused to have children, resulting in the break-up of her marriage. No-one in her family understood her motives for not wanting children and everyone has a different explanation for it. Now, a chance encounter with her former husband reveals his continuing powerful, love as well as a shocking deed she committed during their marriage. But Noga is a free spirit neither tied to the past nor defined by it, and always keen to push boundaries. She lives for her music and is willing to go wherever it takes her. The three-month experiment proves as much of a test for her as for her mother and both are radically transformed by the end.A.B. Yehoshua is as creative, humorous and provocative as ever in The Extra, exploring themes familiar to him of love, family relationships and artistic ambitions, set mainly in an ever-changing Jerusalem.

An experiment is under way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a woman, recently widowed, is starting a trial period in assisted living, mainly to placate her over-anxious son, whilst in Jerusalem her daughter Noga, a young harpist, returns from her job with a Dutch orchestra to look after the family apartment. To enliven her stay, Noga''s brother finds work for her - playing roles as an extra in film, TV, and in the opera Carmen. The random roles Noga is thrust into resonate strangely with her own life which she begins to re-evaluate. Central to her past is the fact that she refused to have children, resulting in the break-up of her marriage. No-one in her family understood her motives for not wanting children and everyone has a different explanation for it. Now, a chance encounter with her former husband reveals his continuing powerful, love as well as a shocking deed she committed during their marriage. But Noga is a free spirit neither tied to the past nor defined by it, and always keen to push boundaries. She lives for her music and is willing to go wherever it takes her. The three-month experiment proves as much of a test for her as for her mother and both are radically transformed by the end. A.B. Yehoshua is as creative, humorous and provocative as ever in The Extra, exploring themes familiar to him of love, family relationships and artistic ambitions, set mainly in an ever-changing Jerusalem.

Zvi Luria has begun to lose his memory. At the beginning he only makes small mistakes, forgetting first names and taking home the wrong child from his grandson's kindergarten, but he knows that things will only get worse.He's 73 and a retired road engineer. His neurologist hints at the path his illness might take and suggests ways of comabtting it, with the help of his wife Dina.Dina, a respected paediatrician, is keen for him to return to meaningful activity, and suggests he volunteers to work with his old colleagues at the Israel Roads Authority. This is how Luria finds himself at the Ramon Crater in the Negev desert planning a secret road for the army with the son of his former colleague. But there's a mystery about a certain hill on the route of this road. Who are the people living there and why are they trapped? And should the hill be flattened and the family evicted, or should a tunnel beneath it be built?With humour and great tenderness, A.B. Yehoshua depicts the love between Luria and his wife as they confront the challenges of his illness. Just when Luria's sense of identity becomes more compromised, then does he find himself, enabling a rich meditation on the entwined identities of Israeli Jews and Palestinians and on the nature of memory itself.Yehoshua weaves a masterful story about a long and loving marriage, interlaced with biting social commentary and caustic humour.

This new edition of A. B. Yehoshua''s novellas and short stories includes two stories which did not previously appear in the hardback edition published in 1988, and no longer includes ''Mr. Mani'' which, in the intervening years, has been developed into a prize-winning novel. The development of the author''s style can be traced from its dark beginnings in stories such as ''The Yatir Evening Express'', about a village which decides to vent its frustration at its isolation and insignificance on the evening express. Isolation and loneliness are central to Yehoshua''s concerns, whether it be people''s isolation from each other, from their community or from their family. The pain of this isolation is intense, as in the title story in which the distance between an ageing poet and his simple son is agonising. In ''Facing the Forests'', a fire-watcher''s isolation gives rise to deep longings for tragedy – a story which has since been seen to symbolise the relationship between Jew and Arab in Israel. Several of the stories deal with people thrust into positions of responsibility and the feelings of frustration and impotence which ensue are disturbing – murderous even. In ''Three Days and a Child'', a man agrees to care for the three-year old son of a former lover. Those three days are marked by a strange detachment and sadistic, heart-stopping neglect of the child. The stories are ironic and understated, and the pace masterly. This collection confirms Yehoshua''s talent as a major short-story writer. He has been awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for his entire œuvre.