Italian swansong of an Israeli Master
David Herman admires the final work by a great writer, A B Yehoshua
A.B. Yehoshua died in June, one of the last of that great generation of Israeli writers born in the 1930s that included Aharon Appelfeld, the playwright Joshua Sobol and Amos Oz. There are two immediately striking things about his final novella, The Only Daughter. Yehoshua’s novels are set in Israel, his greatest subject. But this book is set in Venice and tells the story of a well-to-do family, the Luzzattos, in particular the only daughter, Rachele, bright, precocious, but troubled by her father’s serious illness.
Her father and his parents are north Italian Jews. Her mother’s parents, however, are not Jewish and right from the start the issue of Jewishness is central to the story. Rachele’s father won’t let her act in the school play because she is Jewish and he doesn’t
want her performing in a church. The headmistress explains that it’s a play, not a religious service but his response is direct and immediate: “You’ve already eliminated enough of us Jews, so don’t try to steal one of the remaining few.” The headmistress tells the story to a young man, Enrico. He is astonished by the father’s words. “But it wasn’t us, it was the Germans,” he says. “We tried to explain that too,” interjects a teacher, “but he insisted that the Italians helped the Germans hunt down the Jews.” From the beginning, The Only Daughter is about Jews and history.
The second striking feature concerns Yehoshua’s debt to the Nobel prize-winning Israeli writer, SY Agnon. Yehoshua once wrote a fascinating essay about his generation of writers. The reason they spoke to readers, he said, is because of the balance they found between “the revealed and the hidden”. He and Amos Oz, in particular, were hugely influenced by Agnon, “the supreme artist of folding and hidden-away drawers”. Early in The Only Daughter we come across this passage: “She [Rachele] prefers to sit at her father’s desk and inspect his drawers,” and in the top drawer she finds an unopened carton of American cigarettes. Rachele’s grandmother had told her that cigarettes would kill her father one day. She decides to destroy the lethal cigarettes but then remembers that the young rabbi from Israel, who is preparing her for her batmitzvah, had taught her the law of bal tashchit, which forbids destroying something useful.
This is typical of Yehoshua’s book. Everywhere there are drawers within drawers. We are only in the first few pages and already we have had a history lesson about the Holocaust in Italy, while a packet of cigarettes has led us to the influence of Agnon on Yehoshua and to Jewish religious law.
Throughout the novella, apparently innocuous objects turn out to have deeper, sometimes darker meanings. Rachele’s headmistress has given her a beret to protect her from the rain. An abbot, a client of her grandfather the lawyer, is fascinated by the beret. “Interesting,” he says. “During the
war, our partisans wore berets exactly like this one… and in the monasteries we still keep the clothes and belongings of people who hid with us during the war and never came back to get them.” We have just found out that Rachele’s Jewish grandfather disguised himself as a priest during the war, hiding while his wife gave birth to his son, Rachele’s father. Another history lesson.
The book is full of clues and secrets, masks and disguises, carefully woven together. It is also full of layers of history, from the Romans to 17th century Venice, and from De Amicis, a 19th century Italian writer, to the Holocaust. Everywhere, the history of Jews and Christians mix together, just like the Luzzatto family, part Christian, part Jewish, and young Rachele tries to make sense of it all as she fears for her father’s life and prepares to enter Jewish womanhood.
It is an extraordinary book, quite unlike anything else by him, a wonderful farewell from a great literary master, full of references to his own life and work.
Throughout the novella apparently innocuous objects turn out to have deeper, sometimes darker meanings