The first biography of a major cultural figure often leaves a decisive stamp on all future assessments of the image and historical era in which their career unfolded. Our understanding of Dickens, for example, has been deeply affected by the early disclosure of John Forster that the empathy he displayed towards neglected children came from his own obscure experiences as a child, when he was put to work in a blacking factory (which produced shoe polish) while the rest of his family were locked up in a debtors’ prison. In an Israeli context, after Amos Oz passed away, his younger daughter’s revelations reflected negatively on the image of her father as a beautiful soul. Avi Gil’s biography of Avraham B. Yehoshua does not introduce any such bombshells. It does, however, offer a thrilling portrait of a public intellectual and outstanding novelist, starting from his early childhood during the British Mandate amidst the Arab Riots of 1936-39 and the siege of Jerusalem, to his coming of age along with Israel’s independence in 1948, through his active role amidst many of his country’s main milestones until his death from cancer in 2022.
I once immodestly floated by Yehoshua the idea that if nobody rose up to dispel some misunderstandings about his background and ideology, I might have to write his biography. “Someone is already doing it,” he mumbled cryptically. Someone turned out to be Avi Gil, an outsider to the academic establishment whose work as an organizer of cultural events puts him at the center of the pulse of Israeli culture, both high and low. When I first read this book, and as I revisit it now, I felt increasingly grateful for the honest and conscientious way Gil surveys the entire spectrum of Yehoshua’s life and thought. He rightly spends a great deal of time on the nuances of Yehoshua’s family background: a Sephardic Jerusalemite of many generations, whose family nevertheless encouraged him to orient himself toward a modern Zionist intellectual lifestyle, one that has been associated, perhaps mistakenly and stereotypically, with an Ashkenazi secular elite. Gil allows the reader to savor the shapes and sources of Yehoshua’s fabulist imagination, anchored in the lived experiences of an individual who held himself responsible for articulating an Israeli identity during an extraordinary period in Jewish history. In addition, Gil sheds light on the ethics that propped up Yehoshua’s ideological views, especially his belief that an identification with Israel ought to be a primary Jewish value, one which requires as much commitment and vigilance as a good marriage.
Thirty years ago, a very young Avi Gil visited Yehoshua to inquire about unpublished manuscripts; on a whim, Yehoshua handed him an old suitcase full of family documents, diaries, and early, unfinished texts. Eventually deciding to write a biography, Gil supplemented this treasure trove with extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with Yehoshua, his family and friends, some of them well-known pillars of Israeli society, such as former President Reuven Rivlin, former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, and distinguished local and international artists and scholars.
Without generating a toxic trail of collateral damage, and avoiding the Scilla of shallow gossip and the Charybdis of hagiography, Gil steps up to the biographer’s duty to examine all aspects of his subject’s public behavior and private life. We thus learn of Yehoshua’s ingrained sense of competition and entitlement, first with his adoring elder sister and then with his father, a family drama that is explored in several of Yehoshua’s stories. We also learn about the intimate relationships that he had with two or three women before and after his marriage—brief affairs that inspired literary works such as “Three Days and a Child” (1965) and The Only Daughter (2021).
Looming large in Yehoshua’s adult life is his symbiotic relationship with Rivka Karni (“Ika”), the bright and jovial woman whom he courted in their early twenties and with whom he raised three children and built two impressive careers (his as well as hers, as an eminent psychoanalyst). Ika was the trusted reader of his manuscript drafts, and they spent almost every hour of the day together. Her sudden death in 2016 left Yehoshua bereaved until the end of his life, openly sharing his grief with everyone who called to inquire about his wellbeing. With as much attention, Gil delves into the wily methods that kept Yehoshua relevant and always in the public eye throughout his long and productive career. What emerges, overall, is a relatable portrait of a man, kind and down to earth, whom so many of us knew and loved.
Some novelists simply recount their life story over and over again. Although Yehoshua avoided extensive autobiographical references, he did mine his experiences and family background as a source for his vivid characters and absurd plots that he set in a more or less realistic environment. I often wondered why he had assigned his own middle name, Gabriel, to an irresponsible and cowardly character in his first novel, The Lover. This young man abandons his ailing grandmother, as well as his homeland and the battlefield in the middle of a war—actions that do not accord with either his creator or his creator’s namesake, the grandfather Rav Hanania Gabriel Yehoshua. Once the head of Jerusalem’s Sephardic Beit Din, Yehoshua admired his cultural openness. Gil reveals that when the Six Day War broke out, in the summer of 1967, Yehoshua and his wife were on the verge of returning to Israel from Paris, where she had completed her doctoral studies at the Sorbonne. The jarring contrast between three placid years on the banks of the Seine and an expectation of great tumult back home dampened Yehoshua’s health. His fevers and weakness, however, could not be traced to any physiological source.
His first novel—published in 1977 following two decades of great success as a writer of shorter fiction—revolves around a family’s search for a young man missing in action in another war, the Yom Kippur War; but the desire to bolt, which Yehoshua had himself experienced, explains why he projected his middle name onto this character. Unlike the absconding Gabriel, Yehoshua trained in his youth as a paratrooper. Acting responsibly toward his family and nation, he fought in the War of Sinai in 1956, as he did in 1967, despite his mysterious illness. Nevertheless, the clash between a frightening but beckoning Israeli reality and an attractive but alienating diasporic alternative left a deep mark on Yehoshua’s ideological worldview. This tension continued to manifest itself in many of his public lectures and works of fiction for decades to come.
From Gil’s biography we also learn about the direct impact that Yehoshua’s ambition and talent exerted on Israel’s publishing industry. In an effort to reach a broader audience, Yehoshua and Menachem Perry, his lifelong editor, undertook to cultivate a committed network of readers by launching a literary series based on advance subscriptions. Other authors soon also benefited from this entrepreneurial method, and they too were able to rely on a more or less secure readership at home. Early on in his career, Yehoshua won international recognition: first for his short stories, and then for each of his major novels. Their translations into twenty-eight languages were followed by many book tours in Europe, the Americas, and the Far East. In Italy Yehoshua became a household name, so fêted there that an Italian-Jewish researcher devoted an entire doctoral study to his reception in the country. After Ika’s death, the researcher became Yehoshua’s love interest. Gil’s biography does justice to this romantic trajectory—the strong marriage, the sudden loss, and the late-life relationship that inspired new creative angles in Yehoshua’s fiction. Yehoshua’s last two novels, which he completed as a widower in his eighties, were dedicated to this younger woman, who served as their inspiration.
Soon, however, two bouts of cancer left Yehoshua unable to write more than a few lines of dramatic dialogue or deliver more than an occasional public lecture. His last unfinished play, which he called his “political testament,” would have revisited his lifelong engagement with Palestinian-Israeli exchanges on the Zionist ethos. In all his works Yehoshua portrays intimate contacts between representatives of different cultural groups—Jews, Christians, Muslims, even pagans—who interact with each other within and beyond Israel’s borders. One therefore wonders how he would have reacted to the events of October 7; asked this very question at an event marking the publication of Gil’s biography, Yehoshua’s son replied that he doubted his father would have allowed himself to wallow in despair. As he had tended to do from early childhood until his very last hours, Yehoshua would have come up with a thought-provoking solution, bordering on the ostensibly absurd, to the crisis at hand.
Yehoshua wrote thirteen novels and assembled a similar number of collected short stories and plays. All of them deal in some manner with “the condition of Israel.” This topic appears more programmatically, of course, in his essays and lectures, which often approach Judaism from a psychoanalytical perspective, seeking to expose what he regarded as chronic weaknesses that, if left unexamined, could lead to national perdition. Yehoshua strove for harmony and order in his family life and in his social surroundings but, paradoxically, his fiction was marked by a microcosm of Israeli chaos. This served in part to demonstrate an urgent need for deeper empathy toward the less privileged members of the family and the nation. Porous boundaries—geographic as well as cultural—fascinated but also alarmed him: he enticed his characters to explore their potential breaches with amusing and sometimes horrifying consequences. The main thing, he famously insisted, is to redefine Israeli identity and the original name of Israel by wrestling with Jewish history and traditions in against the backdrop of national rebirth. Beyond immediate survival, he argued that the principal difficulty for a modern Jewish state was to conciliate among Jews and Arabs, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, secular and religious, rich and poor, etc.; he railed against the Jews of the diaspora because he feared they would jeopardize the hard-won gains of Jewish sovereignty.
Alongside his close relationship with his wife, Yehoshua’s commitment to Israel was his main focus, his all-encompassing mission. To defend his vision of the homeland he waded into many a controversial encounter, as when he informed the illustrious guests of the American Jewish Committee that they merely “play” with Judaism, while he is “married” to a “total” Jewish identity in the national home. Perhaps naively, Yehoshua hoped that a greater understanding would emerge from such blunt encounters; sometimes this was indeed the case, after he apologized and clarified his intentions. Gil recounts how during the shooting of a documentary on Yehoshua, filmmaker Yair Kedar accompanied the famous author to the polling station; people from all walks of life came up to the tired old man to shake his hand: “I won’t vote like you,” one of them admitted, “but I respect you.”
Politically, Yehoshua dreamed that religious Jews would become modern Israelis and Arab Israelis devoted Zionists. To this end, in his novels, plays and essays, he worked out their points of tension. Sometimes he situated his works of fiction in his own present moment, as when he portrayed the heady days of the Oslo process—only to be rudely interrupted by the Second Intifada—in The Liberated Bride (2001). Occasionally he examined cultural tensions in historical settings, for example the Middle Ages, in A Journey to the End of the Millennium (1997), and two centuries of a Mediterranean saga in his historical novel, Mr. Mani (1990).
About Mr. Mani, it has been said that a Nobel prize was awarded for much lesser achievements. Presented in the shape of five conversations that move backwards in time, this family saga opens on a kibbutz in the Negev during the first Lebanon War of 1982 and closes in an Athenian Inn during the Spring of Nations of 1848. Other pivotal stations are the Holocaust, the conquest of Jerusalem by the British, and the time of the first Zionist Congress at the turn of the 20th Century. At each of these historical moments the Sephardic Manis, who constitute the genealogical backbone of this saga, are puzzled over by Polish, German, and English acquaintances who discuss “their own” special Mr. Mani. However, the main protagonist in this extraordinary novel is not a person but a place: the city of Jerusalem, which grows and changes though she’s often abandoned by the Manis and their acquaintances. While reading each conversation, the technical challenge for the reader is to figure out the words of a “missing” conversation partner because Yehoshua playfully gave us only the words of one interlocutor in each episode, leaving us to work out the perspective of the “missing” interlocutors. When asked what “Mani” means, Yehoshua admitted that he did not know; then he embraced a scholar’s suggestion that Mani sounds like ma ani (what am I?): Ma ani, he had asked himself throughout his life. He left us with this question and many stimulating answers, whose contexts and textures Avi Gil draws out in rich detail in relation to the still-unfolding historical events in which they transpired.
The Mission of A.B. Yehoshua– A Biography by Avi Gil ([Shlihuto shel A.B. Yehoshua: Biographia, Hebrew] Israel: Kinneret Zmora, 2024)