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“A masterpiece” about faith, race, and morality at a medieval turning point, from the National Jewish Book Award winner and “Israeli Faulkner” (The New York Times). It’s edging toward the end of the year 999 when Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant from Tangiers, takes two wives—an act of bigamy that results in the moral objections of his nephew and business partner, Raphael Abulafia, and the dissolution of their once profitable enterprise of importing treasures from the Atlas Mountains. Abulafia’s repudiation triggers a potentially perilous move by Attar to set things right—by setting sail for medieval Paris to challenge his nephew, and his nephew’s own pious wife, face ...
“A fine novel of loss and hope” set in modern Israel and East Africa, from the author of A Woman in Jerusalem (TheBoston Globe). During Hanukkah, Ya’ari, an engineer, and his wife, Daniela, are spending an unaccustomed week apart after years of marriage. While he’s kept busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren, Daniela flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister. There she confronts her anguished brother-in-law, Yirmi, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by “friendly fire.” Yirmi is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of man’s primate ances...
In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies. His years of loving care have ended and his newfound freedom proves unlike the one he had imagined. It is an uneasy freedom, filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love, but whose longing for meaningful relationships is held hostage by the spirit of his wife. Five Seasons is a subtle and often comic novel about love and renewal, and the determination of a seasoned heart to love.
Open Heart is a psychological tour de fource about love and the nature of man's soul. From the opening lines of this first-person narrative, the reader is propelled into the mind of Dr. Benjamin Rubin, an ambitious young internist, who is jockeying for position with the hospital's top surgeons. But it isn't until Benjy learns that his position has been terminated, and that he has been selected to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife to India to retrieve their ailing daughter, that Yehoshua sets his hero on a journey of self-discovery.
A husband seeks his wife's lover who is lost in the turbulence of Israel's Yom Kippur War. As the story of his quest unfolds and grows in intensity, the main protagonists are drawn into the search and transformed by it: through the different perspective of husband, wife, teenage daughter, young Arab emerges a complex picture of the uneasy present, the tension between generations, between Israel's past and future, between Jews and Arabs. The Lover was A.B. Yehoshua's first novel and immediately brought him international recognition. It is brilliant, compassionate and highly original and as accomplished as all his later works.
This novel about the struggle to identify a nameless victim in the wake of a terrorist bombing in Israel is “a masterpiece” (Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review). A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies unidentified in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of “gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee,” the bakery’s owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of figuring out who she was, and burying her, to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as...
An experiment is under way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a woman, recently widowed, is starting a trial period in assisted living, mainly to placate her over-anxious son, whilst in Jerusalem her daughter Noga, a young harpist, returns from her job with a Dutch orchestra to look after the family apartment. To enliven her stay, Noga's brother finds work for her - playing roles as an extra in film, TV, and in the opera Carmen. The random roles Noga is thrust into resonate strangely with her own life which she begins to re-evaluate. Central to her past is the fact that she refused to have children, resulting in the break-up of her marriage. No-one in her family understood her motives for not wantin...
"Elusive, haunting."--"New York Times Book Review" A husband's search for his wife's lover, lost amid the turbulence of the Yom Kippur War, is the heart of this dreamlike novel. Through five different perspectives, Yehoshua explores the realities and consequences of the affair and the search, laying bare deep-rooted tensions within family, between generations, between Jews and Arabs. " A] profound study of personal and political trauma." --"Daily Telegraph" "Has the symmetry of an elegantly cut gem." --"The New Yorker"