AB Yehoshua, the writer who defined Israel's identity, dies at 85

Abraham

family nickname) Yehoshua, the least known, and perhaps most innovative, writer of an exceptional trio of Hebrew storytellers with international projection, along with David Grossman and Amos Oz (who died in 2018), has died this Tuesday at the age of 85 as a result from cancer in a Tel Aviv hospital.

Yehoshua was always at the forefront of literary creation.

His work, translated into three dozen languages, brings the Hebrew language closer to the revolution undertaken by great novelists of the 20th century, such as William Faulkner and James Joyce.

A defender of the right of the Jewish people to live in their ancestral national home, he faithfully defined the dilemmas of Israel's identity, while also advocating, from the Labor and peace left, for a solution to the Palestinian conflict.

For half a century he supported the two-state formula,

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Abraham B. Yehoshua: "Forgetting frees us Jews from the tyranny of memory"

"He offered us a sharp, reliable and loving image, sometimes also painful, of ourselves: a mosaic of deep feelings," Israel's president, Isaac Herzog, fired him on behalf of the nation in an official statement.

Interviewed by EL PAÍS just a year ago, Yehoshua, who always signed his work with the initials of both first names, explained that his serious illness prevented him from having a face-to-face conversation.

Wishing her a speedy recovery, he replied with a hesitation: “I don't know.

Since my wife died [who passed away two years ago], nothing is like it was before.”

In his latest novel,

(Duomo, 2021), he delved into the darkness of Alzheimer's, halfway between realism and symbolism, to try to shed light on the identity of the Jewish State.

Also about his own, trying to redeem himself from the desolation caused by the death of his wife, the psychoanalyst Rivka, with whom he lived for 56 years.

Yehoshua was born inland, into one of the oldest Sephardic families in Jerusalem.

"My father spoke Ladino with his family, but with my mother, originally from Morocco, he communicated in French, so I did not learn Judeo-Spanish", he lamented the absence of his paternal cultural legacy.

"After the Six-Day War, Jerusalem lost its sanity," used to say this former paratrooper, who fought as a reservist in the offensive that triggered the occupation of Palestinian, Syrian and Egyptian territories in 1967.

Ten years earlier, he had participated in the Franco-British and Israeli military operation on the Suez Canal.

Trained in Literature and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he followed a postgraduate course in French Literature at the Sorbonne, but Yehoshua lived more than half his life in Haifa, in northern Israel.

He was a professor at the university in that port city, which he considered the most “harmonious” in a country plagued by conflict.

There he wrote almost all of his work, such as his first novel,

(1977, published in Spain by Duomo in 2013), crowned with success among readers and in its film and theatrical versions.

In that horizon framed by Mount Carmel and the Bay of San Juan de Acre, he also completed

(Siruela, 1999), narrated about an idea conceived during a tour of Andalusia.

This novel describes the tribulations of a Sephardic merchant from Tangier who travels across the Mediterranean to Europe on the apocalyptic eve of the year 1000. As in almost all of his works, marriage and love are the main narrative axes.

“Absurd and banal reality”

With

(Alfaguara, 1984), his first work published in Spain, he follows the thread of sentimental dilemmas.

The author recounts the return of a mature Israeli who lives in the United States, where he is going to have a child with a new partner, to process a divorce with his still wife in Israel.

The novel delves into the two crises that marked him: personal and family life and the complex existence in the Jewish State.

"In a single movement of the wings of his imagination, he shows us to what extent the reality in which we live in Israel is absurd and banal," David Grossman, the now sole survivor of the trio, has written about Yehoshua's mastery. giants of Hebrew-language storytelling, quoted by

Awarded the Israel Prize for Literature and the Médicis in France, he was also selected in 2005 as a finalist in the first edition of the prestigious Man Booker.

He was also a prominent political activist and founder of the Israeli peace NGO B'Tselem.

“The [Jewish West Bank] settlement policy may lead to

daily .

A decade later, he affirmed that the solution of the two States was no longer viable —"it has become just a tagline for the international community", he criticized— in the face of the expansion of the colonies, and pointed towards a confederal formula, in which Jews and Palestinians.

The death of the Israeli author who narrated with allegories the dilemmas of a daily life shared by millions of beings around the world leaves orphans to the readers who admired him for decades.

"I have been a writer who has addressed all the crises and conflicts in the family, but I firmly believe in marriage," he declared to EL PAÍS 11 months ago.

"Memory is a central issue of Jewish identity, which is not based on historical facts, but on a mythology, such as the destruction of the temple [of Jerusalem in the year 70]", he argued about the faith of a diaspora that for almost For two millennia, at each Passover dinner, he has wished to return "next year to Jerusalem."

"The collective memory of the Jewish people is now divisive," he warned, "only forgetting frees us from the tyranny of memory."