Vale Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua

A.B. Yehoshua died this week. He was 85 and a celebrated novelist, short story writer, essayist and playwright.

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, his work was widely translated and adapted to film and stage. He won numerous literary awards including the Israel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Yehoshua was a leading voice in the Israeli Peace Movement, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog said of him that he was “one of the great writers and storytellers of the state of Israel” whose “unforgettable creations will continue to accompany us for generations.”

I spoke to him on Thursday 23 April 2009 on the occasion of the publication in English of his novel Friendly Fire.

Here is the transcript of that conversation, AB Yehoshua speaking to me from Montreal where he was a guest at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival.

Transcript

Ramona Koval: So now to Montreal Canada and the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival who are hosting Israeli writer AB Yehoshua, novelist, short story writer, essayist and playwright, who is much awarded and much discussed, both as a writer (for example, Harold Bloom compared him to William Faulkner), and as a peace activist. His newest novel is called Friendly Fire. And before I tell you the story I have to tell you about the structure because each short chapter, apart from the first and the last chapters, is told from the point of view of each side of a couple. It's a duet, in fact.

Daniela and Amotz have been married for a long time, they have children and grandchildren. At Hanukkah, the eight-day festival that falls in December, they're separated for a few days as Daniela travels to Africa to an archaeological dig to meet her recently widowed brother-in-law. She wants to talk with him about her dead sister and perhaps also about the tragic death of their son, a soldier who was killed by 'friendly fire'. Amotz stays home, very unused to being without his wife, and he works in his lift engineering business. He manages the family and discovers all kinds of things about the love life of his children and of his elderly father.

AB Yehoshua, or Abraham, joins us from CBC in Montreal. Welcome to The Book Show Abraham.

AB Yehoshua: Thank you very much. I'm very, I would say, astonished to speak like this with Australia from Montreal, and I'm very excited to do it with you, of course.

Ramona Koval: We are very excited to have you. You've said before that you are very fond of the idea of marriage, and you've written before about the complexities and the joys of marriages. Tell me what this age-old subject, the connections between a man and woman, what this idea of marriage means to you. What keeps you interested in coming back to this duet?

AB Yehoshua: I think because it is a permanent challenge and a permanent work that is very much rewarded in a certain time but very much difficult in a certain time. And you have to be all the time in alert. I'm thinking about the serious marriage, when you have to maintain equality between the partners. And the way in which you have to keep it alive, revitalise it all the time, not to make it already something that becomes banal and automatic. And in a certain way the moral questions that are arousing all the time, the questions how this decision will be done, who will dominate the other, and the fact that the relationship with the family of the two partners, and the way in which...there are a lot of questions when I compare...and we have a marriage of about 50 years...when I compare the way in which I have to confront my children in comparison to the problem with the activity with my wife, it is really a very challenging thing and I think very rewarding when it's matched very well.

Ramona Koval: It almost sounds like the complexities in running a country, the complexities in running a marriage.

AB Yehoshua: In a certain way, but in a country you have your citizenship but a marriage, you know, can be broken in one minute or in two minutes, and you know and you see and you saw many couples that have been living together for years and then suddenly they separate, and the way of temptations that are coming from both sides. So it is hard work, as I say, but a very, very also rewarding job.

Ramona Koval: You've written about this older couple. They know each other well. There are a huge number of dependencies on each other by now, but they also seem to be still confused about things like their individual sexual needs. How come?

AB Yehoshua: Yes, this is a problem, the question of sex in marriage, because it is not something that you got automatically, and you cannot think that you can get it automatically, you have to work for it, you have to seduce your partner. I'm speaking about marriage in general, of course each marriage is different from the other, but the fact that this is the most intimate relationship with a human being, it's intimate for a long time but very intimate. The intimacies that are achieved in the human relationship by itself is, I think, a value.

Ramona Koval: You have a very interesting situation that happens. I mean, they live together for so long, and now one of them is in a strange country, Africa, and she's very aware of being different; she's a white woman, she's an Israeli, she's untutored in the ways of African culture and the landscape. And the other one, although he's at home, he's also making discoveries about his landscape. So they are finding this time apart gives them a kind of possibility to look at things in a new way. That's really the assumption, isn't it, to divide them like this.

AB Yehoshua: In a certain way he is continuing all the time with his ordinary life, but this week he had some more difficulties. And she of course was coming to speak about her sister and to just sit and chat a little bit with her brother-in-law about memories of childhood, and suddenly she encountered with a man that want to throw away his identity, a bitter man, she knows him from her childhood and here he is. She's encountered with something far more wild and far more bitter than she expected.

And so she, and especially he, passed the conversation from her sister to the tragedy that happened to his son and tell her some things that she didn't not know about his attempt to give meaning to this death of his son that was done by 'friendly fire', and the way in which he was going even to the Palestinian to get some gesture of recognition because the son has done stupidity because he wanted to be nice to the Palestinian and he was doing mistake from the military point of view and he was shot by his comrades, rightly. So the way in which he speaks, she has to struggle with him in order to bring him back to life or at least to his identity.

In the final session when they meet, Amotz and Daniela, after a week of separation, in the airport, he starts to speak about what he was doing this week with his grandchildren, with his father, et cetera, all the troubles that he had, and then he was speaking about an episode in his son's apartment when he passed a night there as a babysitter, he found a pornographic cassette, and he saw it by accident. And she's saying to him, 'You have done good life during this week.' And he says to her, 'How dare you say to me...I was working very hard and all the burden of the house was on me, but you did not do anything, you just sit there and listen to Jeremy, your brother-in-law, and you have been hosted by him.' But she said, 'I was struggling against death.'

And this is the duet. Both of them, without knowing what the other is doing, he was making life, or in Hebrew you say oseh chaim, meaning you are doing a good life, so he was making life, maintaining life, and she was struggling against death, and in a certain way this was the duet without knowing each other what they are doing.

Ramona Koval: Abraham, tell me about using this time of Hanukkah for this separation. It's a festival that commemorates the Maccabees who were a Jewish national liberation movement that fought for and won independence from the Greek rulers in the 2nd century before the Common Era. Each night another candle is lit in family ceremonies and it's these candle-lighting times that punctuate each of the days apart. Why do you want us to be aware of Hanukkah?

AB Yehoshua: First of all it's a very nice festivity, and I was born...my day of birth was in the first candle, and so this is a very sweet and a very loved festivity among children and among adults. But the question was the fire, because I have to use the image of fire in different metaphors. There is of course the 'friendly fire', and friendly fire is an English expression, in Hebrew you say 'the fire of our forces', but still the fact that in the English language you use the word 'friendly' fire makes a kind of a very cynical kind of metaphor because you speak about a fire that was given by your comrades that kill you.

So the friendly fire and the way in which the fire as an image, the fire as an image for the humanity, because the humanity...Jeremy is working with anthropologists, African anthropologists who are going to Africa to find the sources of the great monkeys that have brought humanity, that in the evolution were the sources of humanity. And the fire of course was the element that gave the humanity life, but in a certain way fire is death, fire and...I just want to refer to what I've seen on the television about this nasty and terrible fire in Australia last month or two or three months ago and how devastating it was.

So fire...friendly fire...but here is the candles, and with the candles it's really fire, and this is a very small fire and very controlled fire, and when she brings the candles to Jeremy in order...in hope that they will light it together, he takes the candles...so not only the Israeli newspaper but take the candles and throw them to the fire, and in this sense he says something very, very decisive, 'I'm not only wrapping myself, the Israeli identity, but I'm wanting also to destroy mythology, the Jewish mythology and to disengage myself also from my Jewish identity.'

And in this sense she has to confront a man in 70s that was a very, I would say, active Israelis, and here he wants to rid himself from his identity. And believe me, I don't want to air this, but believe me from time to time after...I am also a man of 72 and very much involved in politics, in identity, in discussion, in ideology, and living from my first day of life in '36 I'm living war after war, and we are tired and I am tired, and from time to time I said to myself, oh, if there is a possibility to get rid of this identity, but I cannot, it's too late for me.

Ramona Koval: I wonder too whether the idea of friendly fire might mean that some of the decisions of your own government might be regarded as a kind of friendly fire.

AB Yehoshua: I suspect, I don't know, I don't want to speak about the last elections that gave the stress to all of us, but I don't know, we are doing mistakes, the Arabs are doing mistakes, both of us are doing mistakes, and we are again and again in this conflict that does not end at all. You know that in Australia there are some Israelis who are running away from their identity. We are just reading a book of a friend of ours who was telling about her son that was three years ago was running away from Israel and he's in Australia, not even in the big city, and the way in which these Israelis try to avoid their identity, going so far as to Australia...it is also a sign of distress in our country.

Ramona Koval: I wanted to talk a little bit now about...I guess it's a metaphor, the lift shafts that make appearances throughout this book, and I must say, it's the first time I've thought about lift shafts in literary fiction. And the whistling sounds that occur when things are not quite working well. The whistling lifts, there are ghosts, there are spirits, there's a real unsettled sense of what's going on back in Israel, in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem. Tell me about this idea of using the lift shafts.

AB Yehoshua: I have to say that to my amazement this is a real thing. We are living in Haifa but when we have all our children in Tel Aviv and especially our grandchildren, we have six grandchildren, we have bought an apartment in Tel Aviv in order to be in the weekend with our grandchildren. And we have bought a new apartment in a tower, and in this tower there is wind and noises and all what I describe in my book is reality. People are always amazed how this idea came to my head, and I say to them, 'Come to my house and you will hear it.' And all the people who are living in this tower were so happy that this phenomena was also expressed in literature now.

Of course you are totally right, we speak about also spirits, because we say ruach in Hebrew, but ruach is also wind, but also spirit. This what will enable me the duet...I could not say that the howling and the noise in the lifts is the spirits of the death, especially the deaths of the last intifada that were most of them civilians, they did not have any recognition because, you know, civilian person drinking his coffee and is killed, how you can honour and how you can give meaning to his death. But I could not say, of course, that in this place of the lifts the spirits of the dead that did not find comfort are still clinging to the houses of the living and saying to them, 'Don't forget us.'

But in the structure of the novel, the fact that Daniela in this time, just a paragraph afterwards, is coming to Africa and there she encounters Sijjin Kuang who is a Sudanese black medical infirmière, and she is believing, she is an animist, she is a pagan and she believes in spirits. So without mentioning anything specifically I gave to the reader the possibility to take a metaphor from one country to another country, to do the conjunctions between these two elements and to really think about the winds in the elevators as the spirits of the deads of our second intifada.

So in the certain way and in many, many other cases...I don't want now to speak about them in this show because there are many examples that I...the duet was giving me the possibility to get metaphor from one story to another story because both of them are done by the same couple, husband and wife, and the possibility to enlarge the scope of metaphors and images on each section was coming by the structure of the novel.

Ramona Koval: There's a very interesting...also a kind of a discussion that goes on in Tel Aviv and Israel between people about the differences between legal responsibilities and moral responsibilities. This is about the lift shafts, because is the man who built the building and built the lift shaft responsible for the noise, or is the man who put the elevator in the lift shaft and didn't notice that there was a problem with the lift shaft before he put the elevator...who is responsible? Tell me about this discussion.

AB Yehoshua: You know, the key word for me is 'responsibility' and this is when I say about when I speak with the Jews I speak about Zionism, when we came to build our land and to normalise our situation, we took responsibility to all the components of our life. This is difficult for the Jews because Jews were living in an environment in which the total responsibility was on the shoulders of the others, not on them. They were reading the texts, they were doing their communities, but the great responsibility of war and peace and economy and foreign policy et cetera was not on them.

And this is perhaps one of the disappointments of the Jews in general about the creation of the state of Israel, that here now the total responsibility is upon our shoulders, and the moral values of our existence is done so the answers that we are giving to the question. In Gaza operation just last...we have a dilemma, are we going to save the life of our soldiers on account of hitting civilians? This was a moral dilemma, and this moral dilemma coming all day in many, many aspects, and the question of responsibility that the Jews, the Judaism is not any more valued according to what the texts are saying, what the rabbi are praying, but according to what the reality is done for good or for the worse, this is a key word for me.

And this little construct of the building and the construct of the elevators...you know, I like very much that my characters will be with profession. When I create the character I want to bring him to the novel with the details of his profession because his profession is part of his personality. I don't want just to say he is an engineer and then discuss his love affairs, I wanted his profession will be realised in the way in which he sings and the way in which he acts, because of course our profession is part of our character, our psychological structure.

Ramona Koval: So how did you study the engineering of lift shafts?

AB Yehoshua: Ah, this was of course...this is the good things in writing. Then you have to leave your desk and you go to a...this I was doing with doctors in open heart, and with historians, with journey to the end of the millennium, and with questions of orientalist, always I go to experts, and they are delighted to help the writers. And of course a engineer of elevators was taking me and we were travelling on the roof of the elevator to see how it functioned, and all these things were all fun, and this is the great time of a writer, to learn, to accumulate material, and then afterwards to sit at his desk and try to implement them in the novel itself.

Ramona Koval: So what about the part in Africa, what about the anthropology and the looking for ancient bones? Did you do something like that too?

AB Yehoshua: I didn't go to Africa but I was studying these things with a professor in the Tel Aviv University. When I was entering his room, he had a large room full of, I would say, ancient skulls and bones of monkeys in all sorts, and he was explaining to me. But here you see again, and I want to demonstrate the way in which these two metaphors are coming in the book...when Daniela is coming in the evening to bring the food to these delegations of African scientists who are doing the job there, they are giving her...after the meal they demonstrate and give a lot of bones that they have found and explain how important this bone and how important is this shape of mouth et cetera.

And then in the same paragraph or in the paragraph afterwards, the other mother-in-law of the grandchildren is coming to the cafe, Amotz is waiting for her, she will have to take the children to her house. And then she bring the teeth that she has just taken out in the dentist, and so you are making connection between the teeth of the grandmother that she had been just taken out now with the dentist, and the teeth and the pieces of bones of the great monkeys that are on the origin of humanity. And in this sense what I want to say is that even with the Jews that from time to time see ourselves as unique, as the chosen people, our origin is also from the great monkeys that were coming from Africa. This is without annoying too much Jews in saying this, but demonstrating in the novel.

Ramona Koval: Daniela makes a couple of visits to a strange elephant with a big blue eye, one big blue eye, and I'm trying to understand...what is the meaning of this elephant?

AB Yehoshua: I don't know myself but I have to say what was the inspiration of it. I don't know if you saw a documentary film done by a German or a French student about the Mongols in which they tell a story about the camel, a female camel, that deliver a son who was white, I don't know how you say in English, a child of a camel. And she rejects him, and all the film is the way in which the Mongols try to approach this camel to her child. I don't want now to enter into all the details, they have to play to her and to sing to her, but finally when she is approaching her child that she reject, she start to cry, and the camera was focusing on the eye of this female camel and the way in which the tears were pouring.

And the way in which you saw something so human in the relationship, in a kind of a relationship between animals, gave me the idea about this elephant that has a genetic problem and his blue eyes. I don't know, you know, from time to time a metaphor is catching you and perhaps someone will interpret it, but I know the sources of bringing this humanity to...a human emotion, a deep human emotion even to animals and the way in which...and weeping of course is the most extraordinary demonstration.

Ramona Koval: But isn't it about the connection with any 'other', whether the 'other' is somebody from another country or somebody of another sex or another animal that has some elements that are similar to yours?

AB Yehoshua: Perhaps. I want to say that there is also a paragraph in which they found a Bible in English, and Jeremy who is very much upset by the brutality of the prophesy of the prophet and the way in which we are all the time feeded by extremely harsh words against ourself that are given by the prophet and by our holy texts...

Ramona Koval: This is Jeremiah, chapter 44...

AB Yehoshua: Yes, exactly.

Ramona Koval: Just explain to the listeners what this prophesy says.

AB Yehoshua: The prophesy said...you know, it is very strange, I don't know if there are other people in the world that are nourishing himself what is the canon, the most important text, the children are learning all the time in schools, some of them are brutal descriptions about the horrifying thing that will happen to our people. And so in a certain way, as if you say all the time to your son, 'Finally you will be killed in an accident, finally you will be killed,' and I think that finally he will be killed because already the prophesy was entering into himself. And because we had so terrible a past, because we had been destroyed in the most terrible thing that ever happened in history, and I speak about the Holocaust, and we are a day after the commemoration of the Holocaust. Jeremy in my novel goes against it, to say 'we have to abolish it'.

Now, to abolish something in the Bible, it is to get to touch the sacred of the sacred, and he's doing it in a certain, I would say, complexity way because they found the Bible in English and then he say to Daniela, 'cite it back from English to Hebrew by your own words.' Because when you read it in the original Hebrew the text is so beautiful and the rhetoric is so capturing the soul because of the beauty of the language, so you don't pay attention to the brutality, to the meaning of the text. By translating it to a concrete Hebrew without the beauty of the rhetoric, you reveal the brutal meaning of the text.

And in the sense of course...I don't now want to enter to all the complexity, what if the text and especially the way in which the people in themselves rejected Jeremiah in the time of Jeremiah, they reject what he was saying, and the way in which we have to escape from this circle of destructions and redemption, destruction and redemption. Even now we had a threat from Iran about annihilating Israel. So after so horrible things that happened in the 20th century, still we are not safe, we are not sitting and saying to ourselves, okay, after what we pass we can sit now quietly. The total threat of total destruction are still launched upon us. I heard in the news, just before our show was starting, I heard about Hilary Clinton speaking about Iran and things like that, so it is a true matter, it's not a theoretical matter.

Ramona Koval: The book we've been speaking about is called Friendly Fire and it's published by Halban, London. Abraham, AB Yehoshua, thank you so much for being on The Book Show today.

AB Yehoshua: I thank you very much because the questions you ask me reveal how deep you enter into this book, and this is not always done with interviews, literary interviews. Thank you very much for avoiding discussion about politics and things like that that we are always pushed to.

Ramona Koval: I think we did very well on that as well. Thank you very much.