Talkin' 'bout his generation

Ronni Shendar

A.B. Yehoshua

The

name A.B. Yehoshua may not ring too many bells here in the States,

but on the international scene, he ranks alongside Gabriel Garcia

Marquez, Gunter Grass and Salman Rushdie as one of the great

contemporary novelists. He is to Israel what Garcia Marquez is

to Colombia, Grass is to Germany and Rushdie is to India -- a

kind of literary spokesman for the entire country.

This might seem incomprehensible

to an American reading public, obsessed with keeping art and

politics separate, because even though we have Toni Morrison,

who comes close, we generally don't have much interest in writers

who are engaged in national culture the way Yehoshua and company

are. So when Yehoshua came to Minneapolis a few weeks ago, he

meant to shake things up a bit, giving two electrifying lectures

and talking some heavy politics in an interview arranged by the

U's chair of Hebrew Studies, Yehudit Shendar.

Open HeartBy A.B. YehoshuaHarvest/Harcourt Brace,489 pp., $14

A Francophile from birth,

Yehoshua speaks English with a curious French accent, and his

wild hair and ecstatic bearing give him a Nutty Professor type

of aura. Lying beneath his disordered manner, however, is a mind

as focused and organized as any in literature. He speaks frankly

about the Palestinian question (he advocates full peace at any

cost), and he stresses the importance of moral and political

involvement on the part of writers. But the moral duty of the

Israeli novelist, Yehoshua says, has a specific dimension that

may seem foreign to other writers:

"The artist in Israel

-- and in Zionism in general -- was very much involved in what

you will call the national activity, the national spirit. They

were involved not only because when there is a great problem

that is happening to a people, generally writers are very much

involved as social critics, as prophets or whatever they are

doing as patriots. But in the Jewish Zionist movement it was

especially important because the renaissance of the Jewish people

of the Zionist movement, of the national Zionist movement, was

done also through the renaissance of Hebrew. So they were not

only participating in the big event as partners, but also it

was very important because they were very active in the recreating

of the Jewish language. Because in order to do a national movement,

it was a necessity to bring back, to revive the Jewish language."

But Yehoshua is finding

himself to be one of the last of the Israeli writers engaged

in this larger arena. It seems that Yehoshua and fellow novelist

Amos Oz, who are both part of a leftist section of the Israeli

Labor Party called the "Sane Left," form the last of the old

guard. Only novelist David Grossman, who is even further left,

and whose book See Under: Love is one of the best

novels of the last 10 years in any language, is as engaged.

"My feeling is that we

are the last one," Yehoshua says, "my generation -- and perhaps

David Grossman, who is younger, and perhaps he is the last one

-- who are very much involved in public affairs, that are still

writing from time to time in articles, that are shouting, that

are giving interviews and things like that. The younger generation

doesn't want to do it anymore. The younger writers are writing

their Postmodern literature -- they are doing it with great joy,

with all the jokes, like your writers. There is a fine writer,

a young writer, who is doing a very smart kind of short story

pieces, and he was asked by a television station to have a dialogue

with one of the former writers, with the more older writer. So

he chose me as a partner, and when he was calling me and saying

to me 'I'm going to come to your house with the crew of television,'

there was some kind of terrorist attack, and I was saying to

him, 'Prepare yourself. We will have to talk about -- we will

be asked by the television about this and that.' And he said,

'Why? We have to talk about politics? No, no. I am not coming

here. I don't want it at all.'"

Writers want to write personal literature, which

is important, but Yehoshua says that there has to be a balance

between the inner and outer worlds of literature:

"A writer has his duty first of all to do a fine

literature that will touch the individual, that will speak on

the behalf on the individual. And so it's very difficult how

to find your way in between your duty as a writer to speak about

the big issues -- and especially about the moral issues -- and

to do your private literature with all the subtleties of psychological

description, of human situations."

Yehoshua's history as

a writer is a testament to how artists can integrate the needs

of the individual and the needs of society. Starting out at age

21 -- after his military service -- Yehoshua worked as a short

story writer, feeling out how to create a prose style, and then

moved on much later to larger forms -- and issues.

"I was starting writing abstract short stories

in the mood of Kafka and some of the abstract writing of Agnon.

And then, little by little, I was descending from the abstract

writing to reality, and I was very much influenced in a certain

time of my literary career by Faulkner. In my mind Faulkner is

the best writer of the century in any language. ... He was important

in the way in which he was doing the multi-voices novel. This

for me was important especially in the '70s, when I felt that

Israel was cracking, dismantling to many voices, and the way

to recreate a novel that will express rightly the mood of Israel

-- the model was given to me by Faulkner."

He's been called "a kind of Israeli Faulkner" by critic Harold

Bloom, and Yehoshua explained part of his fascination with Faulkner

in his lecture, "Modern Democracy and the Novel." Arguing that

all the greatest works of literature from this century were written

in its first fifty years, he says he would take the works of

"Thomas Mann, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Kafka,

Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, the less famous Hemingway, Fitzgerald,

Bruno Schulz, Musil, Doblin, Agnon and Celine" over any of the

great works written in the past 50 years.

It's

not just the mysticism of time that makes these writers seem

better than more contemporary ones, Yehoshua says, but that the

current political scene isn't conducive to great writing. He

points to modern democracy -- democracy as practiced in countries

like the United States, that is -- as one of the key factors

in literature's decline. Many of the great novels of the past

-- from de Cervantes' Don Quixote to Faulkner's As

I Lay Dying-- strove toward a democratic aesthetic, Yehoshua

says, but with today's capitalism-disguised-as-democracy, writers

somehow think there's no more work to be done.

Don Quixote

was radical because it placed more emphasis on the voices of

the poor than of the aristocracy, and writers as late as William

Faulkner were still expanding this vocabulary. Faulkner's As

I Lay Dying took

the democratic mode in literature to its highest point, Yehoshua

says, with each chapter narrated by a different character --

none of which having any supremacy over any other. With this

barrage of voices eliminating any kind of ersatz objectivity

on the part of the narrator, Faulkner was able to create a world

as seen by its inhabitants, not just by its creator.

It's this kind of democratic agitation that Yehoshua sees as

missing from modern novels. But he, at least, is still interested

in progress. Taking his cue from Faulkner, Yehoshua uses the

multi-voice technique in ways even more radical than the Mississippi

master's. His 1976 novel, The Lover,

was his first foray into this style, but his 1989 novel, Mr.

Mani, rivals even

the astonishing See Under: Love

as the great novel of modern Israel.

Mr. Mani tells

the story of the Mani family through five long conversations,

held over the course of 150 years. In each conversation, the

reader hears only the voice of one of the speakers, which makes

the whole thing both radically disjointed and almost infinitely

suggestive. Each speaker is somehow connected with the Mani family,

so the reader gets to see its progress through Israeli/Palestinian

history not only from the outside, but through several unrelated

and openly biased eyes. Each speaker has his or her own story,

and watching all the various threads -- of the Mani family and

the speakers -- come together is one of the most thrilling reading

experiences in modern literature.

Yehoshua's last book,

Open Heart, is a bit of a retreat from this style,

however. Following one narrator, Doctor Benjamin Rubin, on his

impossible love affair with his boss' wife, the book finds Yehoshua

writing a more personal kind of fiction for a change. Although

it's amazingly rich, with uncanny characterization and an almost

unfathomable spiritual depth, it's just not as compelling as

his other work. Part of this has to do with the translation.

Yehoshua's old translator, the brilliant Hillel Halkin, just

recently retired, and Open Heart is clumsily translated

by the South African Dalya Bilu.

But Yehoshua

is returning to the larger arena with his next novel, A

Journey to the End of the Millennium, which he just released

in Hebrew. Exploring the relationship between the Sephardic Jews

and the Ashkenazi Jews at the end of the first millennium, the

book looks to be a vast parable extending its reach into modern

Israeli questions -- in short, another Yehoshua masterpiece.

But we'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, check out Mr.

Mani.