A.
B.
Joshua, one of the greats of Israeli literature, who designed and led it for an almost inconceivable period, since he began publishing his stories in the late 1950s (his first story, "The Death of the Old Man", published in 1957), to this day ??
(His book, "The Third Temple" was published in 2022), .....
His extensive work, which included, in addition to short stories and novels, essays, articles, plays and children's books, won him many awards, including the Brenner Prize (1983), prize Bialik (1989), the Israel Prize (1995), the EMT Prize (2016) and the Dan David Prize (2017), and his works have been adapted into films, TV series, plays and even operas ("Journey to the End of the Millennium"), have aroused enormous interest in research And criticized over the years, and spawned many books and articles.
He is survived by three children, Sivan, Gideon and Nahum, and grandchildren.
His wife Rebecca (Ica) passed away in 2016.
Joshua was born in Jerusalem in 1936. On his father's side, Joshua is the fifth generation in the country, to a family that came to Israel in the 19th century from Thessaloniki and Prague;
His mother immigrated to Israel from Morocco only a few years before his birth, in 1932, together with her father, Abraham, after whom he is named.
His father, Yaakov Yehoshua, was himself a wealthy and prolific writer who documented and researched in a series of books and articles the life of Spanish communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the Palestinian press of the time (but he only gained power to publish his books after his son published his book the first one).
As a child, Joshua studied at the Hebrew Gymnasium in Rehavia, then enlisted in the Nahal, participated in the Sinai War and studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University. In 1960 he married Rebecca (Ika) nee Karni. Rebecca holds a doctorate in psychology, where their eldest daughter, Sivan, was born, and when they returned to Israel, they lived for many decades in Haifa, where they had two more sons, Gideon and Nahum.
And there Joshua taught as a professor in the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature.
It was only in the last years of his life that Joshua moved to Givatayim.
From his earliest stories, Yehoshua's uniqueness was evident in relation to the literature of "Dor 5768", which dominated a realistic line planted in the present Land of Israel and immersed in the current problems of the young state. In contrast, Yehoshua, To his good friend, he wrote at the beginning of his career a prolific writing of riddles and symbols, some of which are detached from a specific place or time, and even when connected to Israeli reality they touched it as if through a screen of abstraction and absurdity. "The Book of Deeds"), from the existentialism of Sartre and Camus, and most of all - from Kafka.
Joshua lingered in the transition from writing short stories to writing novels, and his first novels betray the gradualness with which he enters their writing, as they are chapter-by-chapter each bringing a different voice, a different perspective (including marginal voices like that of the Palestinian boy, Naim, in the first novel, "The Lover," from 1977, or of the seemingly insane mother, Naomi, in "Late Divorce" (1982).
In later novels the multiplicity of voices has already merged into more unified texts, but it is possible that the gradual transition to the novel, through the multi-voiced mosaic, opened Joshua's writing to a particularly wide range of expressions and points of view.
But Yehoshua's ability to weave into the deep complexes of Israeli culture is not at all related to the representation of figures from all walks of life and society, but to his ability to build into his writing a system of echoes that touches the most tense nerves of local culture.
Even in a book like "Standing," for example, which was ostensibly driven by an explicit ideological stance against women who choose not to give birth (so at least Joshua said in interviews), much more sensitive references were assimilated in practice, which managed to incorporate questions Body and feelings of guilt, disability and imperfections, with casual, amused allusions, to demographic and sectarian aspects.
There is an irony in the fact that the one who managed to formulate Israeli existence so accurately is Mizrahi, a member of the communities of the old settlement in the Old City.
Joshua dealt with his Orientalism with great ambivalence, which gave rise to his greatest works, especially four novels that deal with Spanish identity and history, and they culminate in his work: "Molcho" (1987), "Mr. Mani" (1990), "Journey to the End of the Millennium" (1997 ) And "Spanish Grace" (2011).
In the introduction to his Oriental father's book on Old Jerusalem, he writes that when asked "where is your Sephardicism," and "why your being radiates no nostalgia to the roots," he refuses to apologize for striving to assimilate into Israeli essence and hope to blur ethnic identities.
"My Spanish has begun to fit into a drawer," he writes, "not too small and certainly not locked, but a defined drawer, which is occasionally opened, but is usually closed."
Over the years, Joshua has consistently opposed Israeli control of the territories and called for the establishment of two states for two peoples, but in recent years his positions have changed and he now believes that the settlements prevent the possibility of a fair division of the land between the two peoples. Palestinian, over the entire territory of Israel.
Along with his political views, he denied the possibility of living a full Jewish life in the Diaspora, and called on Diaspora Jews to immigrate to Israel, things that aroused great resentment in Israel and around the world.
In his well-known essay books, entitled "Thanks to Normality" (1980), "The Wall and the Mountain" (1989) and "Homeland" (2008), he wrote about the need to learn lessons from the Holocaust, which he sees as a warning sign for Israeli society and an incentive for Jews to recover. Which he saw as the "abnormality" of life in exile, through the establishment of an independent Jewish society in the State of Israel.
In an interview with "Israel Today" a year ago, he said: "
The difference between a Jew and an Israeli is that a Jew is a partial thing and an Israeli is a full thing.
The Israeli identity is the full Jewish identity.
We came from the Diaspora as Jews to become Israelis. "
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
If you found an error in the article, we'll be happy for you to share it with us