Writer Abraham B. Yehoshua is dead

Israel is mourning the death of one of the country’s greatest writers. Israel’s President Yitzhak Herzog confirmed the death of Abraham B. Yehoshua in a statement. In it he called Yehoshua one of the greatest writers and storytellers in the State of Israel. And he wrote: “His works, drawing from the image of our homeland and the treasures of our people, reflected to us an accurate, sharp, loving and sometimes painful self-image,” said Herzog. “He awakened in us a mosaic of deep feelings.”

The white-haired, successful author liked to provoke and was one of the most popular Israeli writers in spite of this, or perhaps because of it. In the course of his career, he repeatedly took on institutions or the government and created new perspectives with his view of things. In 2006, he sparked outrage before Jewish US officials in Washington when he said Jewish identity abroad was less developed than in Israel. “Being Israeli is my skin, not my jacket,” Yehoshua said. He later had to apologize because many US Jews felt offended by his words.

Controversial political statements and worldwide literary success

Yehoshua also repeatedly spoke out on day-to-day political issues. In 2006, for example, he called for a ceasefire during the fighting in Lebanon. A year later he spoke out alongside other writers for Israel’s negotiations with the Islamist
Hamas off. This was considered particularly controversial at the time because the Palestinian organization had just violently seized control of the Gaza Strip.

Yehoshua’s works have been translated into around 30 languages. Among other things, the novel “Freundesfeuer” (2009) was published in German, in which a Jewish family has to come to terms with the death of their son after he was accidentally shot by his comrades while serving in the Palestinian territories. In “The Bride Set Free” (2003), an Israeli family is rocked by a long-kept secret case of incest. And in his novel “The Five Seasons of Molcho” (1989), Yehoshua describes how a man liberates himself after his wife dies of cancer.

From Jerusalem to Paris to Haifa: award-winning and busy

Yehoshua has received numerous awards for his literary work, including the 1995 Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor. In early 2017, Yehoshua was honored with the Israeli Dan David Prize. “A notable aspect of his literary enterprise is his continued willingness to experiment with different literary modes, including surrealistic stories, novellas, psychological realism and historical stories (…)”, the jury’s statement read. The National Library of Israel, which preserves his archives, described the writer as “synonymous with modern Israeli literature”.

Abraham B. Yehoshua was born in 1936 in Jerusalem, where his Sephardic family had lived for five generations. He studied literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University there, and from 1963 to 1967 he taught in Paris. Most recently, he lived in the port city of Haifa in the north of the country, where he also taught at the university. Yehoshua was married to a psychoanalyst and had a daughter and two sons. According to the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, Yehoshua’s funeral will take place next Wednesday.

pj/bb (dpa)