Disappearance of Avraham B. Yehoshua, a writer with a singular voice committed to the peace camp

Israeli writer Avraham B. Yehoshua died in Tel-Aviv, Israel, on Tuesday June 14th. He was 85 years old. All those who have approached the man will retain the image of a generous, optimistic being, curious about everything, an observer and a passionate traveler. Contrary to many writers of his country, sometimes camped in a posture of preceptor or fire alarm, and although committed body and soul in the camp of peace with his lifelong friend, the novelist Amos Oz ( 1939-2018), he knew how to laugh, smile and even appear in his stories in an ironic mode, like the potbellied director of Retrospective (Grasset, 2012), which earned him the Prix Médicis Etranger the same year.

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For AB Yehoshua, moreover, involvement in politics was self-evident since he persisted in taking literature as a field of ethical experience, which he develops in an essay, How to build a moral code out of an old supermarket bag (The Shard, 2004). Seeing young Israeli authors deserting public speaking only annoyed him even more. His own fictions echo events that have surrounded if not conditioned writing, whether it be the Yom Kippur War (1973) for The Lover (Calmann-Lévy, 1977), his first novel, published at the age of 40, the attacks and their victims at the bottom of the ladder with The Human Resources Manager (Calmann-Lévy, 2005), or the ravages of colonization, in one of his last works, The tunnel (Grasset, 2019).

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However, Yehoshua’s art goes beyond the limits of the thesis novel. He excelled in building intrigues with complex springs or vast historical or social frescoes which prompted certain critics to see in him a kind of “Israeli Balzac”. Such is the case of Mr Mani (Calmann-Lévy, 1994), his work the most accomplished, in his own eyes.

This Balzacian comparison has at least the advantage of recalling the attachment to Europe and France of an author who perfectly masters our language and spent several years (from 1963 to 1967) in Paris as a shalia’h (Israeli delegate) to the World Union of Jewish Students. He also goes there at the instigation of his wife, the psychoanalyst Rivka Yehoshua (“Ika”), mother of their three children, who shared his life as a companion and ” friend “ he said, from 1960 until her death in 2016.

Like his contemporary the historian Zeev Sternhell (1935-2020), Yehoshua sought his inspiration more in Europe and France than across the Atlantic. The Old Continent then attracted future Israeli writers who, like him, made up the “generation of the State”. Formed in the 1950s, it intends to break with the ideological style, the Zionist “new man” and the symbolism tinged with surrealism specific to the elders of the “generation of 1948” (date of Israel’s independence).

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