His very initials – A.B. – symbolized the man. The first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which generated letters and numbers, in Jewish methods as well, from Canaan through the Second Temple and the Zionist movement and the Israeli democracy. A. B. Yehoshua stood at a crossroad of national and personal identities all this literary life – well-versed, sensitive to nuance, sympathetic, decisive, pragmatic.
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The short story "Continuing Silence of a Poet," which was included in Yehoshua's second collection Facing the Forests (1968) centers on a character, a poet, who decides to stop writing out of utter despair, who thinks it would be better to remain silent because the melody has been lost. The poet in that story is anonymous, like many of the protagonists of Yehoshua's early stories, but the hero's anonymity, his silence, his despair, all appear in Yehoshua's work as a vital, liberating act, not a destructive one. This is the act that restores the melody, which discovers the writing.
At the start of the 1960s, Hebrew literature needed a writer like A.B. Yehoshua – a modernist who belonged to the tradition of Kafka and Borges more than to the legacy of the generation of Hebrew authors who preceded him. Yehoshua, "a son of the old Sephardic community in Jerusalem, who masquerades as Ashkenazi in every aspect," as he described himself in 1989, freed local prose from its rigid focus on naturalism and national realism and opened it to a universal world of symbols and ideas. He had the authority and the ability to cut himself on and create, not by turning his back on his roots, but by understanding the complexity of Jewish thought and its centrality to human existence in general.
Very quickly, he reformulated Israel's place in literature as an important and open one, not necessarily defined, that held an advantage in being able to contain contradictions and split identities. Only with Mr. Mani, which Yehoshua wrote after his father's death, did he "awaken the past," as he put it, and leave his position as "a pretend Ashkenazi" to delve into his Sephardic roots.
Yehoshua's writing travels through the Israeli landscape. He did not behave as the nation's psychologist, but rather as a sophisticated, obsessive observer, and identified the emotional sacrifice Jews have made throughout the generations and Israelis are now making for their conflicted land.
He devoted much of his writing to the family structure and relations between fathers and sons, but by looking at these relations tried to examine the possibility of a next step in the Jewish people's collective existence – both in Israel and in the Diaspora.
As a public figure, Yehoshua was conservative, and adhered to his Sephardic ancestors' traditions. Together with his friend and contemporary Amos Oz, he insisted on serving as a "watchman for the people of Israel," even when that turned into an almost naïve political stance that was natural mainly in the days when literature was part of the great national movement.
But Yehoshua, neither in his early days nor later in life, was not naïve, he truly cared for every soul in the Jewish people and wanted to assign them an eternal space, despite the nomadic DNA and their self-destructiveness. "Moses himself was the one who gave the Jews the option of exile at Mount Sinai. And that's the trouble," he told Keren Dotan in an interview to Israel Hayom a year ago.
A.B. Yehoshua was the last Jewish writer, because the critical mass of our current writers do not attempt to climb into the watchman's post – they are simply "the people of Israel." Like many of our elected officials, who cannot rise above their own egos, most of our writers follow immediate personal opportunities and are motivated by considerations of image, not cultural responsibility. In that sense – the loss is great.
May his memory be a blessing.
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