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A Woman in Jerusalem
by A B Yehoshua
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780156031943 |
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Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)
"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)
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.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
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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!
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780156031943
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Harvest Books
- Translator:
- Halkin, Hillel
- Author:
- Author:
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Israel
- Subject:
- Jerusalem
- Publication Date:
- 20070806
- Binding:
- TP
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 256
- Dimensions:
- 7.92x5.58x.65 in. .55 lbs.
