Abraham B. Yehoshua

Abraham B. Yehoshua, 2017

Abraham B. Jehoshua ( Hebrew אברהם ב. יהושע; ) (Born December 9, 1936 in Jerusalem ) is an Israeli writer and university lecturer.

Life

Abraham B. Jehoshua was from a family of Sephardim . His father was the historian Yaakov Jehoshua, his mother Malka Rosilio. From 1954 to 1957, Jehoshua served in the Israeli Paratrooper Brigade and fought in the Sinai campaign .

From 1957 he studied literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His first literary attempts also come from this time. In 1962 he was able to successfully debut with an anthology of some short stories. During this time he married the psychoanalyst Rivka, with whom he has three children.

In 1963 Jehoshua went to Paris to the Sorbonne and stayed there until 1967. In parallel to his academic duties, he was General Secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students . In 1972 he accepted a professorship at Haifa University , where he has taught comparative literature and Hebrew literature ever since . Only interrupted by a few study visits abroad: 1974 Writer in Residence at St Cross College ( University of Oxford ) and visiting professorships at Harvard University (1977), Chicago (1988, 1997, 2000) and Princeton (1982).

reception

Abraham B. Jehoshua, 2009

Yehoshua is one of the most famous and popular writers in Israel . His work includes short stories , novels , plays, and political essays . Jehoshua himself counts William Faulkner , Samuel Agnon and Franz Kafka among his most important role models. The literary critic Harold Bloom compared him with the former in an article in 1984.

He has made it his business to play an intermediary role between Arabs and Israelis. He is a proponent of a Palestinian state of its own. Since he no longer considers this position realistic, he has recently been pleading for an "Israeli-Palestinian partnership" that would ultimately lead to a common state (Haaretz, April 19, 2018).

In his literary work, Jehoshua also repeatedly addresses important political issues. The novel The Lover is set in Israel in 1973 at the time of the Yom Kippur War . The political and military conditions are reflected in the decline of a family. The plot is shown from six different perspectives, including that of an Arab.

In his novel The Journey into the Year Thousand , the Arab and Jewish worlds mix in the Middle Ages of the year 1000. The focus is on two Jewish traders, uncle and nephew, the former living in Arab North Africa, the latter in Christian France. Here, too, the aim is to reconcile the different cultural and religious worlds.

What is striking in his stories is the contrast between strong women and male anti-heroes, who are characterized by a destructive disposition of characters and the persistent inability to establish lasting relationships. Jehoshua shows the picture of men who try to compensate for their shortcomings through wishful fantasies in relation to older or much younger women (as in his novel Return from India ) or children, even through imagined incestuous relationships. In his novel The Liberated Bride , the weak or failing men symbolize the deficits or even the failure of Zionism.

Honors (selection)

• 1989 Bialik Prize for beautiful literature and the science of Judaism (together with Avner Treinin )
• 1990 Honorary Doctorate from Hebrew Union College
• 1998 honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University
• 1999 honorary doctorate from the University of Turin
• 2000 honorary doctorate from the Bar Ilan University
• 2012 Honorary Doctorate from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
• 2012 Prix ​​Médicis étranger for Rétrospective
• 2017 Dan David Prize
• 2017 International Antonio Feltrinelli Prize

Works (selection)

stories

• Given the woods. Stories. Piper, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-492-11664-7 .
• Early summer 1970. Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt / M. 1989, ISBN 3-596-29326-X .
• The continuing silence of a poet. The collected stories. Halban, London 1988, ISBN 1-870015-14-2 .

Novels

• The lover. Novel. 3rd edition Piper, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-492-21769-9 (EA 1980).
• The journey to the year one thousand. Novel in three parts. Piper, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-492-04012-8 (EA 1997).
• Late divorce. Novel. Piper, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-492-21723-0 (translated by Barbara Linner).
• The manis. Novel. New edition Piper, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-492-23369-4 .
• The return from India. Novel. Piper, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-492-03772-0 .
• The five seasons of Molcho. Novel. New edition Piper, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-492-11556-X (EA 1989).
• Friends fire. Novel. Piper, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-492-05161-3 .
• The liberated bride. Roman (translated by Ruth Achlama). Piper, Munich / Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-492-04313-5 .
• The passion of the HR officer. Roman (translated by Ruth Achlama). Piper, Munich / Zurich 2006, ISBN 978-3-492-04709-8 .
• Spanish mercy. Roman (original title: Ḥesed sefaradi , translated by Markus Lemke ). Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-42397-4 .
• The tunnel. Roman (from the Hebrew by Markus Lemke ). Nagel & Kimche, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-312-01148-3 (eBook ISBN 978-3-312-01137-7 ).

Plays

• A night in May. A play in three acts. Tel Aviv 1974.
• Objects.
• A woman in Jerusalem. Halban, London 2006, ISBN 1-870015-98-3 .
• Legacies. Theater Verlag Stückgut, Munich 1986.

Political essays

• Exile of the Jews. Neurotic Solution? Röhrig, Sankt Ingbert 1986, ISBN 3-924555-08-7 .
• Between right and right. Doubleday, Garden City, New York 12981, ISBN 978-0-385-17035-2 .

literature

• Bernard Horn: Facing the fires. Conversations with Abraham B. Yehoshua (Judaic traditions in literature, music and art). University Press, Syracus, NY 1997, ISBN 0-8156-0493-9 .
• Adam Z. Newton: Not quite Holocaust Fiction. Abraham B. Yehoshua's "Mr. Mani ”and WG Sebalds “ The emigrants ”. In: Marianne Hirsch, Irene Kacandes (Ed.): Teaching the respectations ogf the Holocaust. (Options for teachinG; 18). MLAA, New York 2004, ISBN 0-87352-348-2 , pp. 422-430.
• Gilead Morahg: Shading the Truth. Abraham B. Yehoshua's "Facing the Forests". In: William Cutler, Davcid C. Jacobson (Eds.): History of Literature. New Readings of Jewish Texts in honor of Arnold J. Band (Brown Judaic Studies; 334). University Press, Providence, RI 2002, ISBN 1-930675-13-5 , pp. 409-418.
• Gershon Shaked: Gerson Shaked interviewed Abraham B. Yehoshua. In: Modern Hebrew Literature / 3. Series , Vol. 3 (2006), Issue 3, pp. 157-169, ISSN  0334-4266 .
• Matthias Morgenstern : Foreign mother "Erez Israel". In: Yearbook for Biblical Theology 23 (2008), pp. 195–210.
• Matthias Morgenstern, friendly fire, hostile fire. War and the consequences of war as topics of Israeli literature, in: Karl Müller, Werner Wintersteiner (ed.), "The earth does not want to carry a smoke mushroom". War and Peace in Literature, Innsbruck-Wien-Bozen 2011, pp. 181–201.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Harold Bloom: Domestic derangements. A late divorce . In: The New York Times . dated February 19, 1984.
2. ↑ Abraham B. Jehoshua: Wall or border. Why the State of Israel urgently needs to separate from the Palestinians in the interests of peace and security - even unilaterally if it has to . In: Die Welt from August 16, 2003, ISSN  0173-8437
3. ↑ ^{a b c} translated from Hebrew by Jakob Hessing.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Translated from the Hebrew by Ruth Achlama .

Web links

Commons : AB Yehoshua  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Abraham B. Jehoshua in the catalog of the German National Library
• Photos