The Apprenticeship of a Jewish Teenage Girl in Venice by Avraham B. Yehoshua.
When a legal case is delicate to the point of representing a danger to public order, it happens that we disorient it to judge it. This is a bit what the Israeli Avraham B. Yehoshua does in this beautiful novel, the only daughter, which takes place in northern Italy. This great writer, born in 1936 in Jerusalem, campaigns for the creation of a binational state in Israel. In the only daughter, it is not directly a trial, and no one here decides anything like a judge. On the other hand, the book is a sounding board for identity conflicts whose heart is the Middle East. A little distance doesn’t hurt. The story takes place today, even if it is shrouded in a vagueness specific to fairy tales. One day, the heroine is dressed like Little Red Riding Hood. She is not introduced to the dangerousness of the world, but to its diversity and the impermanence of things.
The only daughter is the portrait, at a precise moment, of a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish family. Everyone is not Jewish in this family, there were mixtures. She lives in Venice, a city named only at the end of the text when the carnival is being prepared: we are in the city of a pious people where culture and old monuments arise at every street corner, a setting reminiscent of another. Through the couple’s only daughter, the mischievous Rachele, 12, an angry question is asked: what does it mean to be Jewish? Yehoshua is careful not to answer frontally. The humor and intelligence of the writer allow him to take detours. Christmas is approaching and Rachele is chosen by her teacher to play Mary in a show on the Nativity. Rachele’s father, a lawyer, objects to his daughter playing a Christian. But he is not intransigent:Not everything I say should be sacred to you.Rachele’s mother, a Catholic who converted to Judaism at the time of her marriage, is neither for nor against. She is busy with news about the health of her husband, Rachele’s father. Rachele’s grandfather, also a lawyer, is in favor of his granddaughter navigating from one religion to another. During the war, to save himself, his wife and their son, he disguised himself as a priest. He played the role of ajewish priest», as the sagacious Rachele points out to him after he confides this episode to her.
Adored child, only daughter and granddaughter of her parents and grandparents, Rachele wanders from one character to another, from one opinion to another. These movements sign his freedom. Paolo, his grandparents’ Catholic driver, points out to him that “theThe fact that Jews sometimes excel more does not make them more lovable”. Rachel asks him: “Under these conditions, what should they do so that we love them a little? ― That they are really interested in those who are not rich […] Let them ask them about their life, their difficulties, their misfortunes. ― But that’s exactly what I’m doing, Paolo. I try hard with the girls in my class, and it barely works for me.Rachele polishes her ideas like a diamond. Avraham B. Yehoshua features adults who know how to raise a child independently. Readers who like to find themes of childhood and upbringing in a novel will be happy. Rachele prepares her bat mitzvah with a “nice rabbi», «le rabbin Azoulaywho, the poor thing, cannot find a wife in Jerusalem and comes to Italy in the hope of meeting one. Rachele’s learning is also based on reading a classic of children’s literature in Italy, the book-heart by Edmondo De Amicis, published in 1886. She carries it everywhere. The only daughter is a chest from which spring different opinions and experiences.
The more the novel advances, the more the atmosphere is serious. Rachele’s father has a brain tumor. The child calls this mass “a supplement“. Not to end on a sad note, let’s mention the grandfather. Hoping that Rachele will be a lawyer one day, he explains to her how clients have agreed to come out of a conflict: “I left them alone on purpose, so that they would feel that the proposal on the table is not mine but theirs, that they came to it on their own. When you run this firm, you too will behave like me. Put the correct agreement on the table, then leave the room so that they don’t say that the Jew forced them to sign. Do you get it?»