He was 85 years old and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times. Family relationships have been the Israeli writer’s privileged exploration territory
He never stopped reflecting on Israel’s identity and future Abraham Yehoshua
, the great writer who died on June 14, 2022 at the age of 85, was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. Together with the fraternal friend Amos Oz, who passed away in December 2018, had been in many ways the critical conscience of his country, even if at a certain point the two novelists were divided on the solution of the two states, one Jewish and one Arab, as a formula capable of ensuring peace in their tortured land. Oz kept hoping, Yehoshua no longer believed it, he considered it impractical.
On the other hand, the ability to change one’s mind, to question fixed points considered immovable was one of Yehoshua’s greatest qualities. Even the stylistic code of his novels had changed over time, up to the five dialogues of which it is composed Mr. Mani from 1990 (Einaudi, 1994), a work of intense experimental commitment in which the protagonists are told almost exclusively through the words of other people. In his family origins, in his life, in the writings of Yehoshua reflected the immense complexity of the Jewish world.
He lived that heritage of suffering and wisdom intensely, but he also saw its oppressive sides for the collective mental equilibrium. With the novel The tunnel (Einaudi, 2019), whose protagonist struck by the onset of senile dementia, wanted to symbolically question himself about burning theme of memory. And he had come to the conclusion that for peoples to cling with strength and obstinacy to the past can be a misfortune, because it results in a poor ability to live the present in a serene way and to look to the future with confidence.
Yehoshua sottolined me the Palestinians suffered tremendously from an excess of memory, obsessed with the desire to be compensated for the expropriations and sufferings suffered since 1948, but also the Jews, unable to conceive of a situation other than the siege and rejection of the surrounding Arab world, with in addition, in the background, the terrible shadow of the Shoah. Too much memory – the writer had said – turns into a barrier. And at that point any constructive dialogue becomes impossible.
Born in Jerusalem on December 9, 1936, Yehoshua belonged to Sephardic Judaism. His father Yaakov, from Thessaloniki, was a distinguished historian, while his mother Malka Rosilio was born in Morocco. In the years 1954 to 1957 the young Abraham had served in the military and fought in the Arab-Israeli war of 1956, under the leadership of the charismatic Moshe Dayan, the general with the black eye patch, when the forces of the Jewish state had occupied the Sinai for the first time, but they had been forced to withdraw due to the reaction not only Soviet, but also American, in the face of their offensive and the simultaneous Franco-British occupation of the Suez Canal.
Later Yehoshua devoted himself to studies, graduating in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Jerusalem. And at the same time he had started writing. His first book, a collection of short stories titled The death of the old man, it was released in 1962, then other increasingly convincing tests followed. Between the sixties and the seventies Yehoshua had established himself as one of the main exponents of the so-called New Wave of Israeli literaturecharacterized by a greater attention to the individual psychology of the characters.
International success had come with the novel The lover from 1977, published in Italy by Einaudi like all his other works: a sort of polyphonic composition in which the author gave the floor to six different characters to narrate the events of an Israeli family at the time of the Kippur War (1973) . A book that had been translated into 23 languages and had two film transpositions, one of which was made in 1999 by the Italian director Roberto Faenza. Yehoshua’s second novel, too, A late divorce (1982), maintained the same layout of the chapters written each from the point of view of a single character. And even here at the center of the plot there were family relationships, a privileged area of exploration for this author.
While highlighting the difficulties and hardships, Yehoshua deeply believed in the institution of marriage as the fundamental cell of society, provided it was based on a plan of rigorous equality between the spouses. Very attached to his wife Rivka, a psychoanalyst he married in 1960 and passed away in 2016, he had three children with her and was proud of her many grandchildren. After Rivka’s death, Abraham had moved to Tel Aviv from Haifa, the city where he had long taught at the university, to be closer to the rest of the family.
To the understanding literary activity, which had seen him over time publish several highly appreciated novels, such as Return from India (1994), Journey to the end of the millennium (1997), The liberated bride (2001), The human resources manager (2004), Friendly fire (2007), Yehoshua had combined political commitment with the search for a peaceful outlet for the Arab-Israeli conflictwhose reverberations are also present in several of his narrative works.
After having supported for a long time, with Oz and with the other friend David Grossman, the plan to arrive at the creation of one Palestinian state alongside Israel, which seemed to somehow take shape after the Oslo accords, he had recently changed his mind. Having failed the peace process started in the 1990s, he had come to the conclusion that, after the withdrawal of the armed forces of the Jewish state from the Gaza Stripit would have been impossible to evacuate the now too large community of Israeli settlers residing in the territories beyond the 1967 border. He therefore believed that all in all it was worthwhile to sanction also on a formal level the existence of a single bi-national state extending from the Jordan River to the sea, gradually granting citizenship rights to the Arabs of Jerusalem and then the West Bank.
Of progressive ideas, however, he knew how to recognize the wrongs of his side and the political talents of premiere in destra Benjamin Netanyahuwhich assimilated to Silvio Berlusconi. Winner of literary prizes in various countries, Yehoshua had won several in Italy, including Grinzane Cavour, Boccaccio, Flaiano, Viareggio for his career. He was a regular guest in our country on the occasion of the most important cultural events and he looked with interest and respect for the Christian religion, not only at the figure of Jesus, but also at that of Saint Paul. Marked by the disappearance of his wife and then that of Oz, Yehoshua nevertheless considered his own end without anguish, even if he did not believe in the afterlife. Death – he said in an interview with Aldo Cazzullo on Courier – very important. A gift we give to our grandchildren: leave them space.
June 14, 2022 (change June 14, 2022 | 21:52)
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