The writer died at 85. He was convinced that Israel had the opposite problem to the rest of the world: an excess of memory. About death he said: a gift we give to our grandchildren: leave them space
The Israeli writer Abraham Yehoshua died on Tuesday 14 June 2022 at the age of 85.
Pacifist, me? I am a par !. Abraham Yehoshua, whom friends called Boolie, was a man who all his life wished and wrote for Jews and Arabs to live side by side; he long fought for two peoples two states; in the end he had come to the conclusion that there could only be one state, Israel, in which the Palestinians should have had all the rights, including the right to go to government. Perhaps a utopia, about which he had quarreled with his friend Amos Oz: for a lifetime they dined together one evening a week, until politics divided them.
After a lifetime in Haifa, Yehoshua had moved to the twenty-first floor of a tower overlooking Tel Aviv; so, she said smiling, he could keep an eye on his seven grandchildren; the eldest, Tamar, was already in the army, and he was very proud of her. Yehoshua had waged the Sinai War in 1956. he commanded Mosh Dayan, whom he highly esteemed: he was the real premier, Golda Meir suffered him. He imposed peace with Egypt. He was a man with a formidable erotic charge. Animated by libido. Great warrior, with a romantic side: a lover of literature, archeology. Women loved it. The black patch on his eye then drove them mad. I’ve never seen an amateur like this.
He too, Yehoshua, was a very physical, sensual, empathetic man. At the University of Jerusalem he met Rivka and after six months he married her. She was 19, he was 23. They were together for 56 years, until Rivka’s death. He still loved her, very much, and he loved her until yesterday.
He did not love Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Israel, for he recognized great qualities: very intelligent. A genius of communication. And unfortunately also an extraordinary manipulator. He has a 20-year-old son who spends his days on social media sowing discord. And then an international leader. We are a small country of eight million inhabitants, and Netanyahu is always on TV talking in Russian with Putin, hug the American presidents, shake hands with Modi, laugh with Xi-Jin-Ping…. But there is one thing he was unwilling to forgive him: he conveyed the idea that only a Jew can be a true Israeli; something that the religious like very much. But in this way he humiliated the Israeli Arabs.
In recent years, Yehoshua no longer believed in peace. He believed in a partnership: Living together, under one roof, under one sky. We will be a single state, but not a Jewish state: open to the Palestinians, including those of the West Bank. Amos Oz did not agree, he claimed the need for a Palestinian state, and one evening he said to him: But in this way we will end up having an Arab premier! There will never be integration! Yehoshua replied that the integration would be done in the hospital. We are naked in the hospital. the place of suffering and intimacy. Already today Arab doctors treat Jewish patients, and Jewish doctors treat Arab patients.
His idea was that Israel should unilaterally grant residency first, then Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians of the Territories. There will never be a peace with treaties, signatures, flags. There can be coexistence. Enough with apartheid. We have to mix. He was convinced that Israel had the opposite problem to the rest of the world: an excess of memory. Elsewhere you have little. We have too much. Palestinians spend their lives complaining about the Nakba, the catastrophe, the expulsion from their land. They dream of the Eawda, the return. They guard the keys to the great-grandfather’s house. Keys that no longer open any doors. Instead of the great-grandfather’s house there is a skyscraper or an Apple store. That’s enough! We Jews too, for: a whole amarcord. The wars. The kibbutzim. The barracks where the settlers were crammed. And then the Shoah…. Obviously Yehoshua cultivated the memory of the Shoah. For him he wrote pages that only a Jew could have written. In the book he had just published, the last time I went to interview him, The tunnel (published in Italy by Einaudi), the protagonist loses his memory and tattooes the numbers of the car alarm on his arm. The author was aware that he had desecrated a symbol. And he claimed: We need to decrease the intensity of the memory. Which does not mean forgetting; it means looking at the things around us. Getting out of the trap of identity.
The Jewish identity, he argued, does not exist, or rather there are many: the Ashkenazim and the Sephardi, the religious and the laity, the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox, the twelve tribes… His mother’s family was Sephardi, he came from Mogador, Morocco. Her father was from Thessaloniki. He remembered the founding of Israel well. I was eleven and a half years old. We stayed indoors for two months. Besieged. The British fought alongside the Arabs, one of their bombs hit our house, my father was wounded. Atrocity on both sides. If they caught us, they would cut our throats at best. We won because we were better organized. And we had more confidence in ourselves.
All his life he had voted to the left, but the left appeared to him in crisis everywhere, because it had lost the people: perceived as a global elite of artists, writers, translators who know each other, get engaged, invite each other to conferences where they express contemptuous judgments about the rest of humanity. And a little bit true too. In Israel the situation aggravated by the fact that the left failed to make peace. Also due to the suicide of the Palestinians. According to him, Arafat had lost all opportunities.
He had no big plans for the future: I lost my wife, I lost Amos. I just have to die too. What’s in the afterlife? Nothing. Luckily. Very important death. A gift we give to our grandchildren: leave them space.
June 14, 2022 (change June 14, 2022 | 10:05)
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