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A Woman in Jerusalem

by A B Yehoshua

ISBN13: 9780156031943
ISBN10: 0156031949
Condition: Standard
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"A suicide bomb attack sounds like an obvious topic for a novel set in modern Jerusalem. But there's nothing obvious about the new novel A Woman in Jerusalem by award-winning Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua....Yehoshua seems to have deliberately detached A Woman in Jerusalem from daily life, to better explore people's moral obligations to one another." Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review)

"A Woman in Jerusalem...need not appease our skepticism about every particular detail in order to work its peculiar and powerful effect. Yehoshua's moral fable combines the amusements of imagination with the responsibilities of conscience. If love here turns out to be the ultimate moral expression, it is evidence that the sleep of reason does not produce only monsters." Ruth Franklin, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless 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 identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape — she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful — he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love.

At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.

Review:

"Israel's master novelist (Mr. Mani) tells a spellbinding tale about a spellbinding woman whose luminous smile, swan's neck and Tatar eyes are so beguiling that even in death she can lead a man to fall in love with her. The woman is Yulia Ragayev, a Slavic immigrant to Israel who has been killed in a terrorist bombing and whose corpse lies unidentified in a morgue for a week. The man (who, like everyone in the novel except Yulia, remains nameless) is the human resources manager at the commercial bakery where Yulia worked as a cleaning woman. A muckraking article forces the bakery's owner to discover her identity and take action to restore her dignity. The owner orders the HR director to return Yulia's body to her son and mother in her native land for burial — a journey that turns into an opportunity for moral redemption for him after a series of stunning reversals. Throughout, Yulia remains a mystery: why did she come to, and cling to, Jerusalem when she wasn't Jewish? Questions of morality, dignity, identity, nationality and belonging are subtly explored in sometimes hallucinatory prose, fluently translated by Halkin. This short novel's layers reveal themselves only gradually and, once revealed, continue to compel and provoke." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"It is a typically unfunny Middle Eastern irony that A.B. Yehoshua's entrancing new novel seems to have had its genesis as an exercise in imaginative sympathy about the terror-traumatized citizens of Jerusalem, written by probably the most famous resident of the comparatively tranquil city of Haifa. 'A Woman in Jerusalem' then wound up being published in English at precisely the moment that Jerusalemites'... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) hearts were going out to Haifa residents huddling in their bomb shelters beneath barrages of Hezbollah rockets. But while the novel is always aware of the sorrows of modern Israel, it soars on wry, wise wings far above the battered landscape.

How battered? Well, the heroine is a corpse: Yulia Ragayev, a fortyish, lovely, lonely worker in a Jerusalem bakery who's mortally wounded in a terrorist bombing in the city market, dies in a hospital after two days of solitude and then is left 'in the hospital morgue abandoned and unidentified, her fate unmourned and her burial unprovided for.' A muckraking local newspaper finds that she was identified only by her pay stub and assails the bakery for heartlessness in an expose entitled 'The Shocking Inhumanity Behind Our Daily Bread.' The firm's wealthy old owner tells his melancholy human resource manager — 'a stocky man with a hard, weary face' — to try to make amends by finding out what went wrong and by giving Yulia a proper funeral. (The novel's original title, translated from the Hebrew, is 'The Mission of the Human Resource Manager.') 'At a time when pedestrians were routinely exploding in the streets,' Yehoshua writes, 'troubled consciences turned up in the oddest places.'

'A Woman in Jerusalem' is a book about a mission and a memorial. Yulia is the only character to receive a name here; her son, ex-husband and mother are identified only by their roles, as are the human resource manager's daughter, mother and ex-wife, the bakery's owner, various bureaucrats and the odious, plot-triggering journalist himself, who is known throughout as 'the weasel.' This namelessness summons up memories of Israel's most famous memorial, the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, which takes its name from Isaiah 56:5, in which we are told that God will give those who cleave to Israel's covenant 'a hand and a name.' That includes, the prophet notes, strangers who join themselves to God, who will also have their sacrifices accepted upon the altar built on Jerusalem's holy mountain — strangers, it seems, such as Yulia, a mechanical engineer of never entirely established Jewishness who immigrated to Israel from a nameless realm of the former Soviet Union. Yehoshua gives her a name, and the human resource manager tries, however belatedly, to give her a loving hand. To a wily old humanist like Yehoshua, there are no marginal deaths, no acceptable losses.

This may sound gloomy, but this dreamlike book turns out to be anything but: It's lively, fleet, sometimes funny and ultimately hopeful. Some of Yehoshua's older concerns — such as the misgivings of Palestinians living in awkward proximity to the Jewish state, a major theme of his splendid previous novel 'The Liberated Bride' — are touched on in brilliantly light asides, such as the glimpse inside the mind of a young Arab dishwasher who's eager to sleep in the bakery's deserted cafeteria 'without having to worry about the three humiliating checkpoints he had to pass through' to return to his West Bank village.

The book's faintly surreal quality persists as the human resource manager tries to make sense of Yulia's life. She turns out to be a largely ignored figure in the holy center of the world — a woman in Jerusalem, not necessarily of it. The human resource manager's quest leads him inexorably to Yulia's birthland, a sort of anonymous Absurdistan still unnerved by Cold War fears of planetary annihilation. It is a deliberate step out of sacred time and space; the human resource manager's flight even leaves on Friday night, winging him away from Israel's day of Shabbat rest. And here, amid the 'black slush,' 'low, leaden sky' and 'arctic cold,' he takes on a new essence: The human resource manager is now frequently referred to as 'the emissary,' a man sent to atone for our common coldness, an envoy dispatched a world away from Jerusalem's heat and light and violence to affirm that those who are murdered callously must not be mourned casually.

The result is a small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion. 'I'd like a yes or no answer: are we guilty or not?' the bakery owner asks at one point. 'Responsible is more like it,' the human resource manager replies. 'Responsible for what?' the old man wants to know. 'I'll tell you later,' replies the emissary.

Warren Bass is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Warren Bass, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Review:

"An elegantly structured, thoroughly accessible story, albeit one with rich philosophical layers...A Woman moves us with deep insights into the meaning of home, belonging and the fate of the stranger." Miami Herald

Review:

"[An] astonishing new novel....Like sacred music, the deepest chords resound." Harper's Magazine

Review:

"What engages Mr. Yehoshua most here is the question of humanity....Yet his evocation of what it means to be human is drawn in the subtlest strokes....A sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart — for other people as well as his own." The Economist

Review:

"[S]mart, suspenseful....Tautly composed in a manner akin to Kafka and Babel, Yehoshua's brilliant under-your-skin satire subtly evokes thoughts of war and terrorism, vulnerability and fate, the sacred and the profane." Booklist

Review:

"[A]n emotionally powerful novel....A moving, unsentimental reckoning with death and renewal." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"[T]he writing is beautifully exact and the moral issues delivered with understated authority. Yet the protagonist's circumscribed nature and grinding battles to accomplish his goal can lend the narrative an airless and boxed-in feel." Library Journal

Review:

"This novel has about it the force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece....Yehoshua, long a master of gentle, almost Chekhovian comedy, takes in this instance a deeply bleak premise...and creates from it a work of art by turns absurd, strange and moving." Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

One of Israel's preeminent writers, A. B. Yehoshua has been awarded the Israel Prize, the Koret Jewish Book Award, and the National Jewish Book Award. Born in Jerusalem, he lives in Haifa.

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: Laurie Blum, August 19, 2007 (view all comments by Laurie Blum)
"A Woman in Jerusalem" by A. B. Yehoshua is to be read & reviewed by my book review club this fall ,,, so many discussable issues including the crossing of borders and cultures -- fictional history at its best by one of Israel's leading authors!
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780156031943
Author:: Yehoshua, A B
Publisher:: Harvest Books
Translator:: Halkin, Hillel
Author:: Yehoshua, Abraham B.
Author:: Yehoshua, A. B.
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Israel
Subject:: Jerusalem
Publication Date:: August 2007
Binding:: Paperback
Language:: English
Pages:: 237
Dimensions:: 7.92x5.58x.65 in. .55 lbs.

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