Abraham Yehoshua the Israeli writer and playwright was 85 years

Abraham Yehoshua, the Israeli writer and playwright, was 85 years old: His literature can…

That New York Times he had defined it the Israeli Faulkner. But the writer Abraham Yehoshua, who died last night in a Tel Aviv hospital at the age of 88, was not exactly the type for literary absolutist centralization in American sauce, quite the opposite. Thanks to the involuntary accompaniment of the affirmation of the colleagues Amos Oz and then from David Grossman – a kind of secular Holy Trinity of the Israeli novel -, Yehoshua had shifted the narrative and political axis, and transmitted a kind of rigorous individual-national psychoanalysis, all within the territorial perimeter of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Probably many Italian readers will remember him for his most articulate and successful novel, The lover, written in 1977 but published in Italy over ten years later, thanks to Einaudi. Just in the naturally mysterious unfolding of a double sentimental affective pursuit, something vaguely Schnitzlerian (to understand that there is as much psychoanalysis in our literature as if he were a Central European), shortly after the Kippur War of ’73, the Yehoshua outlines the characteristics of a uniquely visceral approach to individuality which constantly mixes with the fragmentary roots of two peoples and two nations: Israel and Palestine. The sweet and haunting hypnotic singing of Adam, workshop owner in the mental and psychological pursuit of the silent and elusive, probably unknown woman Asya, and the contemporary outlook on life of 15-year-old Daphne, their daughter, the touches of existence and the physical Bodies of Na’im “the Arab”, the boy who works in his father’s garage, are the approach/distance architrave of a constant and infinite pacified research between the individual and society, symbol of a literature that knows how to combine microcosms and macrocosms with moral truthfulness. Hard to find among the following eleven titles by Yehoshua something that rivals this minimal historical orchestration a country embattled and exhausted by decades of war. Another glimpse of a divided and divided Jewish mind may come from another excellent novel such as Journey to the end of the millennium (1997). This duality of historical religious identity is placed far away in the period around the year 1000, almost to freeze and better observe that even today the internal conflict of Israeli Jewry cannot be synthesized in a national uniqueness. After all, Yehoshua had always supported politically and publicly, along with his friend Oz, the so-called “two-state solution” already outlined after the end of the Arab-Israeli War of 67, with the hypothesis of a secure State of Israel and alongside it an independent State of Palestine. A pacifist and democratic yearning that in the seventies/eighties could concretely represent half of Israeli society, closely linked to the development of the workers of this country and the number of Yitzhak Rabin. This vision dissipated with the assassination of Rabin and faded over time, becoming a secular and enlightened minority verb. Likewise The Liberated Bride (published 2018), but set shortly after the unhealed gash of Rabin’s murder, appears to be yet another attempt to thwart the individual sentimental anxiety of the protagonist, a history professor who once again finds help in a concrete pacification with the surrounding Arab world World. Longing for unity in the diversity of differences that many biographers have traced back to Yehoshua’s family origins, which are Sephardi or Mizrachi, in contrast to Oz and Grossman, whose roots are Ashkenazi or European, and then submerged in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Greek father and Moroccan mother, for a social vision that once made him say: “The Arabs are not our enemies, they are cousins ​​(…) they are more a kind of family, with all the problems that a family brings . We have to live with them.” All Abraham Yehoshua novels are published in Italy by Einaudi.