“I was thinking my duty as a writer was to penetrate my pen in the black plastic into which we bury the unidentified dead.” Even in an informal onstage interview with Eleanor Wachtel, A.B. Yehoshua speaks in haunting images. Discussing his two most recent novels, A Woman in Jerusalem and Friendly Fire, Israel’s pre-eminent contemporary author cloaks his anguish about the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in wit, irony, and lyricism. That anguish cuts to the heart not so much of politics, territorialism, and tribalism as of simple humanity and compassionate ethics.
“In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, literature put morality on the front page. Now we are too much emphasizing psychology and leaving too much to the media and the justice system to judge what’s right and wrong. But when you only look at the moral issues you can find new truths.”
In A Woman in Jerusalem, Yehoshua focuses on the victim of a suicide bombing, a Christian woman on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, whose body is unclaimed for a week after her death. The novel links Yehoshua’s conviction that “Jerusalem is important for all religions,” with his horror at the moral impact of the second Intifada on Israeli society.
“Israeli society can’t cope with these civilian deaths. The blood of the terrorist mingles with the blood of the victims. Israelis and Palestinians are becoming alienated to each other’s deaths and to their own deaths. The indifference to each other is becoming hopeless and dangerous.”
Yehoshua brings a touch of black humour to his description of the research process for A Woman in Jerusalem. “The best thing about writing a novel is to leave your desk and go to the experts. When I have to describe the morgue, I go myself to this place. … It was strange that those dead bodies wrapped in black plastic were more frightening than those that were unwrapped. Looking on a dead man’s face, I am living with the notion that my death must come. I am not afraid. It is natural. This is because my father used to speak all the time about his death. We were joyful with death.”
Elaine Kalman Naves is a Montreal writer.
