Judas (Amos Oz)

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Mirjam Pressler and Amos Oz (2015)

Judas (Hebrew original title: הבשורה על פי יהודה, literally translated: "The Gospel according to Judas") is a novel by the Israeli writer Amos Oz from 2014. The German translation by Mirjam Pressler was published in 2015 by Suhrkamp Verlag and received the Leipzig Prize Book fair .

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In the winter of 1959/1960, the equally exuberant and lethargic 25-year-old Schmuel Asch got into a life crisis. His parents, from whom he has long been estranged, can be studied at the University in Jerusalem finance any longer. His thesis with the title Jesus in the eyes of the Jews comes to a standstill. His girlfriend Jardena left him to marry a hydrologist . And the working group for socialist renewal , in which the staunch socialist is involved, is about to be dissolved. Shmuel breaks off his studies and wants to leave Jerusalem as soon as possible. When he put his few belongings up for sale, he came across an advertisement entitled Offer of a personal contact , in which a single student was wanted to join a disabled old man for a few hours a day for free lodging and little financial support.

Alley in the She'arei Chesed neighborhood of Jerusalem

Shmuel Asch reports to the ad in Rav-Albas-Gasse on the edge of the She'arei Chesed district of Jerusalem and meets the 70-year-old Gerschom Wald, a cultivated man with a beard like Albert Einstein , who speaks enthusiastically, lectures and discussed, but hardly talks about private matters. The 45-year-old Atalja Abrabanel also lives in the house, who has an unexplained relationship with the forest and whose charisma and aloofness immediately fascinated the young Shmuel. He accepts the job and from now on keeps company every evening in the library of the Gerschom Wald house. The rest of the day he sleeps in his attic, strolls aimlessly through Jerusalem and tries to get closer to Atalja in their rare encounters. He also finds time to continue his studies of the Jewish view of Jesus of Nazareth . He is particularly interested in the person of Judas Iscariot , whose alleged betrayal continues to affect the present and determines the relationship between Christians and Jews . Shmuel wonders if it wasn't just Judas' loyalty that led to the betrayal of his teacher.

When Gerschom Wald fell ill, Shmuel Asch entered his private quarters for the first time. He learns the story of Wald's son Micha, who was married to Atalja Abrabanel and was brutally killed in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 . To this day, Wald blames himself for the death of his son, because his own Zionist speeches would have inspired him to participate in the war in the first place. Wald's intellectual counterpart at the time was Atalja's father Shealtiel Abrabanel, a member of the leadership of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization . Abrabanel opposed Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion more and more violently over the years and advocated reconciliation in the Arab-Israeli conflict , for which he was slandered as a “traitor” by his compatriots. For the last few years he has lived isolated and cared for by his daughter with the forest under one roof. After Micha's death, there was silence between the two men with opposing political views. Abrabanel died a broken man who destroyed all his work and records before his death and whose role in Israeli historiography was suppressed.

Wald warns Shmuel to fall in love with his daughter-in-law Atalja, as many of his predecessors would have done. But the young man has long been inflamed for his hostess, who is twenty years older, and goes out with her irregularly, mostly under the pretext of disguising her work for a detective agency. During one of these night trips, Shmuel injured his foot. Atalja moves the young man to her father's room to look after him there. She is moved by his awkwardness and more out of pity she sleeps with him. After his convalescence, both are aware that Schmuel's time in the house has expired and Atalja will hire a successor for him. Shmuel leaves the two people he has learned to love and now finally leaves Jerusalem behind. His goal is a newly established city near the Ramon crater . There he hopes to finally find what he is looking for in life.

expenditure

Awards

Stage version

A stage version by Clemens Bechtel, who also took care of the production, premiered on March 1, 2017 at the Wiesbaden State Theater . The roles were taken on by Maximilian Pulst (Schmuel), Rainer Kühn (Gerschom), Sólveig Anarsdóttir (Atalja) and Benjamin Krämer-Jenster (Abrabanel).

Web links

Reviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ruth Kinet: “I can't sleep at night in Germany” . Interview in: Deutschlandfunk from November 16, 2014, accessed on March 23, 2015
  2. ↑ Judith von Sternburg: Death, betrayal, love . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of March 3, 2017.