A victim of a suicide bombing lies nameless in a hospital morgue, and a Jerusalem newspaper accuses her employer of "gross negligence and inhumanity." Overwhelmed by guilt, her employer entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to another employee. As the facts of the woman's life take shape, the employee yields to feelings of regret and atonement.
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A victim of a suicide bombing lies nameless in a hospital morgue, and a Jerusalem newspaper accuses her employer of "gross negligence and inhumanity." Overwhelmed by guilt, her employer entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to another employee. As the facts of the woman's life take shape, the employee yields to feelings of regret and atonement.
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A. B. Yehoshua's novel, "A Woman in Jerusalem" raises a number of difficult themes -- the nature of love, the search for identity, the importance of place -- but explores them unconvincingly. I don't think the novel succeeds.
The story involves a dead non-Jewish woman, Yulia Ragayev,in her late 40s who had immigrated to Jersualem with her Jewish lover and her son from a former marriage. When her lover and son leave, she opts to remain and is killed in an attack by suicide bombers. Although trained as an engineer, Yulia has taken a job as a cleaning woman with a large bakery company, whose parent company also makes newsprint. Upon her death, she is traced to the company, and an opportunistic news reporter, the "weasel", is going to publish an article faulting the company for not showing more compassion towards its employee.
Only Yulia is named in the novel with the other characters identified by their functions, such as the "weasel", the "office manager", and, the chief character "the human resources manager". A theme of the book thus seems to be the anonymity of modern life. The owner of the company, out of a mixture of genuine compassion and self-interest for his business, charges the human resources manager to learn Yulia's story and make appropriate amends on behalf of the company. The human resources manager ultimately travels with Yulia's coffin to an obscure village in Russia in the depth of winter, where he encounters the Israeli counsul, Yulia's ex-husband, her son, and her mother.
The book tells of the outward journey of the human resources manager to secure a proper burial for Yulia and his inward journey to find himself. The human resources manager, in his early 40s, has just been divorced and is living with his mother while he prowls the pubs in the evenings in search of a new relationship. He worries about his teenage daughter. He had interviewed Yulia and given her a job but had no memory of her. In particular, because he was wrapped up in himself and his own troubles, he missed her beauty and her charisma which was apparent to everyone else. But he becomes attracted to her, in her death, in attempting to give her a proper burial, and in the process he tries to understand what he himself wants from life.
There are many threads and evocative moments in the book, but they mostly don't lead anywhere and the story doesn't come together. One of the better moments was a scene near the end of the novel where the human resources manager and the reporter ("weasel") discuss Plato. The two men had been students in philosophy classes at the university. The reporter, for all his cynicism, has been working for years on a dissertation of Plato's Phaedo, a dialogue which discusses the fate of the soul after death. He and the human resources manager have a discussion about Plato's Symposium, and its treatment of human love and its relationship to the eternal. With an ironic wink in his eye, Yehoshua has the weasel say that "Platonic love has been mined to exhaustion." (p. 186). A little later in the conversation, the weasel observes that "that's love's secret. There is no forumla. Each person has to find the secret for himself. That's why Eros is neither god nor man.... yet he links the human to the divine, the temporal to the eternal." (pp 187-188) The theme of the soul's immortality in Plato's Phaedo and of the nature of love and eros in the Symposium capture many of the themes of this novel.
Yehoshua's book reminded me of Jose Saramago's novel "All the Names", in which all the primary characters except for the main character, are, likewise, nameless. In Saramago's book, a lonely and alienated clerk in the General Registry becomes obsessed with and searches for a beautiful woman who has died. Saramago's and Yehosua's books use many of the same devices and, in their pictures of anonymity and loneliness, emphasize the need in human life for connectedness and love. Readers interested in the themes Yehoshua treats may enjoy Saramago's fine novel.
Robin Friedman
Toby
Apr 3, 2007
the Personal and Mundane Experience of Terrorism
A.B. Yehoshua's novel " A Woman in Jerusalem" is a sparse but gripping character study of Israeli life as everyday people pursue everyday life in a time when terrorist attacks are an everyday reality. As the story unfolds, the intimate lives of the characters are laid out through the minute details of life; we never know their names but we come to know them. The range of the novel reflects the mixture of cultures and backgrounds that is the essence of modern Israel. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the psychology of life. The emotionality is Israeli in flavor- intense but understated.
