Yael Halevi-Wise
THE RESTROSPECTIVE IMAGINATION OF A. B. YEHOSHUA
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021 ISBN: 978-027-108-785-6
Reviewed by Philip Hollander1
Only a child when the State of Israel was established in 1948, Avraham B. Yehoshua was too young to be active in the Israeli literary scene at its inception. Nevertheless, he made his literary debut during Israel’s first decade when the highly realistic prose narratives of the then dominant first generation of native-born Israeli writers focused on the 1948 war, agricultural settlement, and the emergent state bureaucracy. Therefore, Yehoshua’s surrealistic short story “The Death of the Old Man from the First Floor” (“The Death of the Old Man” is the story’s revised title) stood out and heralded impending changes in Israeli literature. Indeed, this story about an old man who will not die deployed symbolism in a manner evocative of the seminal Hebrew literary master S. Y. Agnon’s fiction, but reader awareness that “the Old Man” was the nickname of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion opened the story up to interpretation and the discussion of immediate political concerns in a way that Agnon’s stories never had. Together with Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld, Yehoshua propelled a new wave in Israeli fiction that has become the bedrock of Israeli literature over the course of the last sixty years.
In his mid-eighties, Yehoshua is in a certain way like his debut story's old man —something that is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing, because he continues to share the products of his rich literary imagination with readers, as evidenced by publication of his most recent novel Only Daughter in 2021. Yet Yehoshua’s longevity has also been a bit of a curse for a writer of his stature. While scholars and critics have published profusely on his belles-lettres, they have largely focused on individual works. There are a few monographs, such as Gilead Morahg’s Compassion and Fury: On the Fiction of A. B. Yehoshua, but most scholars have put off methodical study of his oeuvre until it finds completion. Therefore, the publication of Halevi-Wise’s English-language monograph proves noteworthy, because it offers the type of systematic study that Yehoshua’s fiction has long deserved.
One of the merits of Halevi-Wise’s book is her decision to eschew authoritative readings of individual texts to focus on Yehoshua’s style and his fiction’s “underlying techniques and overarching themes.” In this way, her book proves accessible to both lay readers and students who might never have read any of Yehoshua’s fiction and scholars well versed in his work. It proves useful to readers looking to better understand texts discussed in the book or more recent works just published.
Although Halevi-Wise occasionally references short stories and novellas written during the first twenty years of Yehoshua’s literary career, her book concentrates on the novelistic phase in his career that began with publication of his first novel The Lover in 1977. Since from this point onward a wide panorama of characters drawn from different segments of Israeli society and occasionally diverse periods and places in Jewish history became a defining characteristic of Yehoshua writing, this decision proves justified. Halevi-Wise’s decision to divide Yehoshua’s writing into two periods enables her to offer a more comprehensive discussion of style in the latter period. As Halevi-Wise insightfully notes, Yehoshua’s novels are constructed through the creative interweaving of “four layers of signification—psychological, sociopolitical, historical, and historiosophic (or mythological).” While the sociopolitical and historical layers of signification help produce a sense that Yehoshua’s characters are operating in a time and place akin to the extraliterary reality experienced by readers, the novels’ psychological and mythological layers of signification typically cause events to veer off course and produce absurd situations that are an important source of humor in Yehoshua’s novels.
More importantly, through their ability to disrupt readers’ sense that they understand the rules of Yehoshua’s novels and extraliterary reality, these absurd situations point to defamiliarization as the key artistic technique that Yehoshua employs in his self-appointed role as “a national repairman.” By presenting common things in unfamiliar or strange ways, Yehoshua endeavors to push his readers towards a new perspective on Israeli life achieved through consideration of how his novels’ four layers of signification work in tandem with his protagonists modelling the benefits of such behavior and the dangers that come with avoiding it. With her perception colored by her friendship with Yehoshua, Halevi-Wise views this politicized use of defamiliarization as something positive that pushes readers towards productive consideration of different solutions to the problems besetting their lives and Israeli life more generally. Alternatively, one can perceive the ease with which Yehoshua’s psychologically-troubled characters achieve epiphanic moments that help them get their lives back on track hackneyed and his simplistic myth-infused solutions to complex problems of modern Jewish life trite.
Whatever one thinks about Yehoshua’s efforts to serve as a modern day “national repairman,” it proves the impetus for his writing; Halevi-Wise’s awareness of this enables her to chart out a number of prominent techniques that Yehoshua repeatedly uses to code his novels’ messages and also give his novelistic medium its distinctive character. For instance, Halevi-Wise dedicates a chapter to how Yehoshua frequently depicts “alternative diasporic situations across time and space” in his novels to foreground debates surrounding identity in Israel at the time of their composition. Similarly, she dedicates chapters to Yehoshua’s use of vocations, names, and holidays. More than just the flotsam and jetsam of mimetic depiction, Halevi-Wise shows how Yehoshua carefully selects elements of daily life to supply his readers with access to his work’s mythological and psychological layers of signification. For example, Yigal is the name of protagonists Adam and Asya’s dead son in The Lover. Awareness that this name means “will redeem,” deepens readers’ sense of the malaise besetting parents still mourning a dead child, but it more acutely activates the situation besetting Israelis in the mid-seventies. After the 1973 war, Israelis were coping with their recognition that they were leading their lives in a world conspicuously lacking redeemers and searching for ways forward without them. The novel aids readers in contemplating their options.
For anyone looking to better understand the artistry of Yehoshua’s fiction or to better decipher his novels’ messages, this book is indispensable.
1 Philip Hollander teaches Hebrew language and culture at Cornell University. His recent publications include From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature (Indiana University Press, 2019) and “Challenging Contemporary Historiography in Shmu’el Yosef Agnon’s Only Yesterday,” Israel Studies 25.3 (Summer 2020): 106-129.