Friendly Fire

A.B. Yehoshua (1936-2022) was one of the leading voices of Israeli literature, a novelist, playwright, and essayist whose fiction explored Jewish identity, the Israeli condition, and the long tension between Diaspora and homeland. Born in Jerusalem into a fifth-generation Sephardic family, he drew on a heritage that set him apart from the largely Ashkenazi literary establishment of his youth. His father was a scholar of Jerusalem’s Sephardic community, and his mother had come from Morocco.

After army service in a paratrooper unit and studies in literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University, Yehoshua taught for many years at the University of Haifa. He was part of the “New Wave” of Israeli writers, alongside Amos Oz and others, who turned away from the collective, ideological fiction of the founding generation toward more private, psychological, and often allegorical storytelling.

His novels return again and again to a central question: what does it mean to be a Jew, and what does it mean to be an Israeli? The Lover (1977) set a love story against the trauma of the Yom Kippur War and placed Arab and Jewish characters in the same fraught space. A Journey to the End of the Millennium (1997) moved into the medieval world, following a Sephardic merchant who travels between Muslim North Africa and Christian Europe and confronts the divisions within the Jewish family itself. Mr. Mani (1990), considered by many his masterpiece, traced five generations of a Sephardic family backward through two centuries of Jewish history, from 1980s Jerusalem to Nazi-occupied Crete and the Ottoman Levant. A Woman in Jerusalem (2004) used the death of a foreign worker to examine moral responsibility and human dignity, while The Retrospective and The Tunnel addressed memory, aging, and the limits of understanding.

A thread running through his work was his well-known critique of the Diaspora. Yehoshua argued that Jewish life reaches its fullest expression through sovereignty and responsibility in a Jewish state, a view he expressed provocatively in essays and public debate. Yet his fiction is rarely polemical. It stays attentive to family, ambiguity, and the quiet dilemmas of ordinary people. He was also a committed advocate of a two-state solution and a prominent figure in Israel’s peace camp.

His books have been translated into dozens of languages. He received the National Jewish Book Award, the Israel Prize for literature in 2005, and the Man Booker International Prize shortlist in 2005 and again in 2017. He died in Tel Aviv in June 2022, leaving behind a body of work that remains central to understanding modern Jewish and Israeli life.