AB Yehoshua, who died of cancer, aged 85, on Tuesday, was undoubtedly one of Israel’s greatest writers. He was awarded the Israel Prize, the country’s highest cultural honour, in 1995, and his work has been translated into almost 30 languages.
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Yehoshua – whose work was known for its beautifully observed portrayals of Jewish life, particularly in contemporary Israel – was the last of that pre-eminent generation of Israeli novelists that included Aharon Appelfeld, Joshua Sobol and Amos Oz.
It is now more than 50 years since Yehoshua published his first short stories. Then, in the late 1950s, he belonged to a new group of Israeli writers who, in his words, helped “consolidate and mould the Israeli identity.” In an essay about this generation, he argued that the reason they spoke to readers was because of the balance they found between “the revealed and the hidden”. He and Amos Oz, in particular, were hugely influenced by SY Agnon, “the supreme artist of folding and hidden-away drawers”. He could have been writing about himself. Yehoshua’s quiet fiction about ordinary lives always turns out to be something else, cleverer, darker, and more disturbing than it seems.
On the surface, Yehoshua’s characters often seem ordinary. In his novel Friendly Fire (2007), Daniela is a middle-aged English teacher in Tel Aviv; her husband Ya’ari is a lift engineer. She goes on a trip to Africa to visit her brother-in-law. Her husband stays behind to look after his business and help with the grandchildren. But the ordinariness is deceptive. First, these are ordinary people in an extraordinary place, contemporary Israel. A problem with a faulty lift (is it a problem of design or the way it was later built?) becomes a metaphor for Israel. Were the problems of Israel today already there in the conception of the state? Could it be fixed?
Israel was Yehoshua’s great subject. Unlike most of the best-known Israeli writers, he was a Sephardi Jew. The others were Ashkenazi: Benjamin Tammuz was Russian; Yehuda Amichai, German; Appelfeld from Bukovina. Yehoshua’s family came from Greece in the mid-19th century. “Not because of pogroms,” he once told me, “not because of antisemitism. Because of ‘next year in Jerusalem’.” He went on: “In my DNA, the Zionist gene is extremely strong.” His father Yaakov Yehoshua, a fourth-generation Jerusalemite, worked as a translator for the Mandatory government of Britain. He spoke and wrote Arabic fluently, writing 12 books in that language.
His mother, Malka, one of 11 children, was born in Essouira, Morocco. She was brought to pre-state Israel by her widowed father in 1932. “I think about the Arabs not as enemies but as cousins,” Yehoshua said. “They are more of a kind of family — with all the problems of a family. We have to live with them.”
He was educated at the Gymnasia Rehavia, a secular school in Jerusalem, and served in the airborne battalion of the Nahal Brigade, with which he saw action in the 1956 Suez War.
Yehoshua published his first short stories in 1957. “In that very same year,” he said, “I remember Aharon Appelfeld reading his stories Smoke and Berta. Amos Oz showed me his first story a year or two after this.”
The term “generation” was crucial for him. “I believe in generations,” he once said. In particular, he thought of himself as part of “The Generation of the State”, important in helping to “consolidate and mould the Israeli identity.”
“The nucleus of their experience,” he believed, “was the creation of the state: from the land of Israel to the state of Israel.”
This generation internalised very clearly the transition from Eretz Israel to Israel, he said, and this had great significance, “since through this we acquired a grasp of frontiers and the security that comes from understanding frontiers.”
The image of the frontier is important in his fiction. Many of his characters move between Israel and abroad. In Friendly Fire, Daniela travels to Africa; in The Retrospective (2011), an Israeli film director goes to Spain; and in The Extra (2014), the central character returns to Israel from The Netherlands, following the death of her father.
Yehoshua first came to critical attention with short-story collections he published in the 1960s. He was influenced by writers as varied as Kafka, Agnon and Faulkner. Faulkner, in particular, taught him how to combine history with “specific attachment to a particular place.”
His later novels are about characters approaching old age. In The Retrospective, a filmmaker in his seventies attends a retrospective of his films. Someone tells him that his mother believes in the director’s future. “My future?” he says. “At my age?” The Extra tells the story of an elderly widow trying to choose whether to live out the rest of her life in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. His novel The Tunnel is about a road engineer, also in his seventies, trying to deal with the onset of dementia.
Of course, these novels are also about people dealing with Israel’s past. In The Tunnel, the road engineer and a young colleague visit Ben-Gurion’s grave. “Silently they read the names and dates engraved on the stones. Two births for Ben-Gurion: the first in the Diaspora; the second, the real one, the date of his Aliyah to the Land of Israel.” These late novels have a wonderful restraint, an increasingly elegiac feel.
Modern-day Israel, however, seems more troubled. “Everything around is collapsing,” says one character in his novel, A Woman in Jerusalem. The real values that come to the surface in this deeply moral book are the importance of love and caring for each other in anxious and fragmented times. A lifelong Zionist, Yehoshua never idealised Israel. When I asked him how he would like to be remembered, he said, without missing a beat: “As an honest writer.”