AB Yehoshua
Author and activist who advocated a two-state solution in Israel before radically changing his view
AB YEHOSHUA, who has died aged 85, was an Israeli novelist, essayist and playwright, and a political activist who fiercely opposed the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands but at the same time remained a diehard Zionist.
While his literary work shifted over the years, from surrealist stories to realist novels, Yehoshua remained, above all, attuned to the Israeli society of which he was part and whose blend of people – religious and secular Jews, Israelis on the Right and the Left of the political divide, Palestinians living in Israel and those in the Occupied Territories – provided him with a wealth of material to write about.
Yehoshua’s works often defined the times – and moral dilemmas – in which they were written. In Facing the Forest (1968), which is a painful examination of the Palestinian tragedy, an Israeli army reservist is on guard duty, watching over a wood planted in the new state of Israel. Sharing his duties is an older and mute Palestinian Arab, whose tongue was cut out in the 1948 Arab-israeli war.
The climax comes when the Palestinian sets the forest alight, burning it down until the ruins of his old village emerge from the ashes. When published, this story was a radical statement, recognising that Israel had been built on the ruins of another society, displaced and dispossessed.
The Lover (1977) is told against the shift in Israeli society from the Laborite and largely Ashkenazi Left, to the Right-wing Likud party. In this novel, Adam, a middle-aged Israeli, searches for his wife’s lover amid the chaotic aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
A leading character is an Arab teenager, Nahim, who turns out to be the lover of Adam’s daughter – a most daring literary choice for the time. In interviews, Yehoshua would often say that he saw it as his duty “to make the Arabs flesh and blood, to make them real”.
As an essayist, Yehoshua wrote four books and countless articles on antisemitism, Zionism, Jewish identity and politics. For 50 or so years he advocated the creation of a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine, the latter on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
However, in 2016 he made a breathtaking U-turn, abandoning this idea, saying that a two-state solution was “no longer feasible”. He was fearless in his criticism of the Israeli occupation, showing an understanding of Palestinian frustration, asserting that “the Palestinians are not the first to be driven to madness by the Jewish People” and insisting: “The occupation is poisoning us.”
He caused a stir with his conviction that authentic identity as a Jew requires settlement in Israel. He once said of the protagonist of A Late Divorce (1984) that “like the father … who gives up his responsibilities and goes to America, Jews who leave Israel for America are escaping their responsibility.”
He would often use the most derogatory terms, both in his writings and public appearances, to describe Jews who choose to remain in the Diaspora. In 2003, he referred to Diaspora Judaism as “masturbation”, while life in Israel was “the real thing”. He repeatedly stated that all Jews living outside the state of Israel were “partial Jews”, and that “in the future when outposts are established in outer space, there will be Jews among them who will pray ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ while electronically orienting their space synagogue toward Jerusalem.”
Avraham (“Boolie”) Gabriel Yehoshua, was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, then under British Mandate, on December 9 1936, the younger of two children. His father, Yaakov Yehoshua, a fourth-generation Jerusalemite, worked as a translator for the British Mandatory government and also wrote books on folklore, portraying the life of Jerusalem’s residents in the late 19th and early 20th century.
His mother, Malka, (née Rosilio), one of 11 children, was born in Mogador, Morocco. She was taken to Palestine by her widowed father in 1932 and was married to Yaakov Yehoshua; on his parents’ unhappy marriage, Yehoshua would say that it was what cemented in him the notion that “my wife – I will love her. And I will not compromise on that matter.” Avraham grew up in Kerem Avraham, outside the Old City of Jerusalem, where relatively prosperous families rented rooms to writers and artists (another future Israeli author who grew up there was Amos Oz). Yehoshua attended the Rehavia Gymnasium, established in 1909 as Jerusalem’s first high school in which teaching was done in modern Hebrew. His literary path began there. “I used to write a ‘feuilleton’ – a sort of story pamphlet – for the class and I’d read out the stories to everyone,” he recalled. In 1954, he was conscripted into the Israeli Defence Forces where his “feuilleton” creativity came in handy. “I’d be excused from taking part in the Friday parade so I could get the unit’s stories written, and have them ready for the party in the evening.” But when Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal Company in 1956 and Israel joined Britain and France to regain control of the Canal, the paratrooper Yehoshua found himself fighting in the war. In 1957, upon completion of his military service, Yehoshua enrolled as a student of literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; to support himself he taught at a high school, and would sit at his desk at night to write. His first collection, The Death of the Old Man, appeared in 1963.
That year, Yehoshua moved to Paris and enrolled for a master’s degree in French literature at the Sorbonne. When the Six-day war broke out in June 1967 he returned to Israel to serve as a reservist.
In 1972 Yehoshua started teaching comparative and Hebrew literature at the University of Haifa in northern Israel, where he was subsequently appointed full professor. In 1975 he was made a writer-inresidence at St Cross College, Oxford.
Unlike his Ashkenazi literary contemporaries such as Amos Oz, whose roots were Ashkenazi or European, Yehoshua’s were Sephardi or Mizrachi, rooted deep in the Mediterranean and North African world. In 1990, he published Mr Mani, which was inspired by his own family history and is, perhaps, his most highly regarded book.
The story traces the wanderings of six generations of the Sephardic Mani family from 1982 Jerusalem, then flashing back to Crete in 1944, Palestinian Jerusalem in 1918, Kraków in 1899 and Athens in 1848, often touching upon key moments in Jewish history. Each of the book’s five chapters consists of the dialogue of a single speaker who is telling a story to another character, with that listener’s missing responses implied in the first character’s remarks.
Yehoshua recalled how, while he was writing Mr Mani, friends warned him that readers would not have the patience to figure out what was spoken in the missing half of the dialogue. But the book received glowing reviews and was later adapted for television. “It turns out,” Yehoshua said, “that when you challenge the reader, you enlist him as an important partner.”
In 1995 Yehoshua was the recipient of Israel’s principal cultural award, the Israel Prize, awarded annually by the state for important cultural contributions, along with dozens of other awards. In 2005, he was nominated for the inaugural Man Booker international prize; his books were translated into 28 languages.
He married Rivka (née Kirsinianski) in 1960; she died in 2016. Speaking at her funeral, Yehoshua recalled the first time he saw her, then 19, wearing IDF military uniform, standing outside a Hebrew University lecture hall. “Her smile,” he recalled, “clearly seen even from the third floor … so I quickly proposed to her.”
AB Yehoshua is survived by a daughter and two sons. A B Yehoshua, born December 9 1936, died June 14 2022