A.B. Yehoshua

Avraham Gabriel “Boolie” Yehoshua (1936–2022, born in Jerusalem and died in Tel Aviv after living most of his life in Haifa) [- a central pillar of the “New Wave” generation of Israeli literature. Born into a prominent, fifth-generation Sephardi family in Jerusalem. Served as an IDF paratrooper from 1954 to 1957, participating in the Suez War. Studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Lived and taught in Paris from 1963 to 1967, acting as General Secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students. Joined the Haifa U. faculty in 1972, spending decades teaching Comparative and Hebrew Literature. Published 11 novels, alongside essays, short stories, and plays. Awarded Israel’s top cultural honor, the Israel Prize for Literature, in 1995. His psychological, multi-perspective narratives frequently explored Israeli identity, the diaspora, and intergenerational conflict. A highly visible, left-wing peace activist who fiercely criticized the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Famously polemical, he argued that a full Jewish life could only be lived in the State of Israel, viewing Diaspora Judaism as neurotic and incomplete. Late in life, believing Jewish settlement in the West Bank to have rendered a two-state solution impossible, he reluctantly advocated a single state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians. Major Works of Relevance:

Yehoshua, A.B., (The Lover [transl. by Philip Simpson, hc, Doubleday, 1978]) 978-0385121347 [pb, HarperVia, 1993] 978-0156539128

Yehoshua, A.B., (A Late Divorce [transl. by Hillel Halkin, hc, Doubleday, 1984] 978-0385155748 [pb, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1993] 978-0156494472

Yehoshua, A.B., (Mr. Mani [transl. by Hillel Halkin, hc, Doubleday, 1992]) 978-0385267922 [pb, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, 1993] 978-0156627696

Yehoshua, A.B., (A Journey to the End of the Millennium [transl by Nicholas de Lange, hc, Doubleday, 1999] 978-0385488822 [pb, HarperVia, 2000]) 978-0156011167

Yehoshua, A.B., (The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt: Literary Essays [transl. by Ora Cummings, hc, Syracuse UP, 2000])

Yehoshua, A.B., (The Liberated Bride [transl. by Hillel Halkin, hc, Houghton Mifflin, 2003]) 978-0151006533 [pb, HarperVia, 2004] 978-0156030168

Yehoshua, A.B., (A Woman in Jerusalem [transl. by Hillel Halkin, hc, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006] 978-0151012268 [pb, HarperVia, 2007] 978-0156031943

Yehoshua, A.B., (The Tunnel [transl. by Stuart Schoffman, hc, HarperVia, 2020] 978-1328622631 [pb, HarperVia, 2021] 978-0358555629

5.3.14 A.B. Yehoshua

A.B. Yehoshua does not write conventional crime fiction, but he frequently uses crime, legal transgressions, and moral violations as a vital vehicle for exploring Jewish and Israeli identity. For Yehoshua, a Zionist thinker who argued that a fully realized Jewish existence is only possible within a sovereign state, the presence of crime among Jews is a symptom of normalcy. In his view, a “total” Jewish identity must encompass everything a sovereign nation entails—including taxes, courts, and its own criminals. He incorporates issues of transgression and law into his work through several core thematic approaches:

1. Crime as a Measure of Zionist “Normalcy”: Historically, early Zionist philosophy sought the “productivization” and normalization of the Jewish people, which included the idea that a normal nation must have its own thieves and police officers. Yehoshua embraces this paradox.

The Lover (1978): The novel features theft, garage scams, and the exploitation of Arab workers. Transgressions are woven into everyday Israeli life, showing a society slipping away from pioneering ideals into bourgeois materialism and casual corruption.

The Tunnel (2020): The plot involves an aging engineer who becomes complicit in an illegal, secret construction project designed to preserve an undocumented Palestinian family’s home. Here, the “crime” is a humanitarian transgression against state bureaucracy, highlighting the moral friction between Israeli law and human empathy.

2. Legal Systems and Collective Guilt: Yehoshua often uses bureaucratic or institutional responses to death and moral failing to examine societal flaws.

A Woman in Jerusalem (2006): When a foreign worker is killed in a terrorist bombing and her body lies unclaimed, a human resources manager is tasked with investigating the corporate negligence that allowed her to be forgotten. The novel operates as a procedural investigation into moral failure, analyzing the collective guilt of Israeli society and the loss of baseline human solidarity

The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt (2000): Though a collection of literary essays rather than a novel, this work explicitly outlines Yehoshua’s obsession with how literature unpacks moral and legal culpability. He analyzes how small, seemingly minor transgressions snowball into profound ethical crises.

3. Historical Crimes and Inter-Communal Transgression: In his broader historical epics, Yehoshua shifts the focus to crimes of religious or cultural identity.

A Journey to the End of the Millennium (1999): Set in the year 999, the novel centers on a legal and religious conflict over bigamy. A Sephardic merchant’s practice of polygamy is deemed an unacceptable moral crime by his Ashkenazic relatives in Europe. Yehoshua uses this ancient legal dispute as a vehicle to critique how different factions of Jews historically judged, criminalized, and alienated one another.

4. The Crime of the Occupation: On a political level, Yehoshua frequently asserted that Israel’s military governance over Palestinians is a structural transgression that corrupts the country’s legal fabric. In works like The Liberated Bride (2001), characters navigate an environment permeated by political violence, security breaches, and deep suspicion. The systemic dual legal system of the West Bank is treated by Yehoshua as a slow-moving moral poison that erodes domestic Israeli rule of law. [Google/AI]

Conclusion: For Yehoshua, crime is generally metaphorical rather than literal. He does not significantly contribute to the tradition of Jewish gangster fiction or Jewish detective fiction. Instead, he uses investigative structures, hidden transgressions, and questions of guilt to examine larger issues of Jewish existence: family responsibility, Zionism, Jewish-Arab relations, historical memory, and the ethical burdens of collective life. He thus belongs less to the tradition of Jewish criminals or detectives and more to a tradition of Jewish moral inquiry in which guilt, accusation, and responsibility function as the equivalents of crime and punishment. [ChatGPT]