| Larry Schwartz |
| AFTER years of writing books that dealt with the pressing issues facing his troubled country, Avraham (A. B.) Yehoshua decided it was time to take a break. “I was saying to myself, I want to be totally out of it and I was just taking a rest,” the award-winning Israeli author says. In his latest, ‘Open Heart’, he deliberately avoided issues of national significance. The novel quickly achieved a bestseller status in Israel. Though its critically acclaimed predecessor, ‘Dr Mani’, sold 50,000 copies and is now being made into a five-part TV series, its sales were slower. Yehoshua is surprised at the relative speed with which 84,000 copies of the Hebrew edition have sold. He jokes that such a demand in a small population should be an embarrassment to any self-respecting, serious writer. Yehoshua is the author of at least 13 books (story collections, novellas, plays, novels), translated from Hebrew into languages including English, French, German, Swedish, Arabic, Hungarian, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Danish). He is winner of the Israel Prize for literature. Professor of Literature at Haifa University, he is a contemporary of the better-known Amos Oz, with whom he has shared a passion for peace in the Middle East. They were among four signatories of a letter published in ‘The New York Times’ in February 1988 urging American Jews to protest against Israeli policies on the occupied West Bank or risk the corruption of Israeli society and war. He caused some controversy at a World Jewish Congress assembly in Jerusalem last year when he said that Israel no longer needed the financial or political support from diaspora Jews. He urged other ways to assert common ties, notably by improving their command of Hebrew. He believes his position was misunderstood. He wanted to revitalise the relationship, not end it. Until now, Jews in Israel and without had been bound by “catastrophic issues” – the Holocaust, the plight of Soviet Jews, wars in Israel. Through language, Israel could nourish Jews in the diaspora. They in turn would be more able to participate in its affairs in radio, television and the press. Such is his confidence in his country’s standing in the international community; the strength of relationships with Lebanon, Egypt and elements of the Palestinian community; economic stability and population levels since the influx of Russian Jews; there was no longer any point in a rally outside the White House to say, “Help Israel”. Better a rally to tell American Jews not to be “more patriotic than our Likud people. From time to time, I think they are more extreme . . . Too much support can also harm our liberty”. ‘OPEN Heart’ is the story of an ambitious, would-be surgeon persuaded to accompany a hospital administrator and his wife to a remote village in India where their daughter is seriously ill and subsequent events centering on the doctor’s love for the administrator’s wife. Though the novel was warmly received by most Israeli critics, one took exception to an alleged hedonism and detachment, not just in this book but by other noted writers. When he began work on ‘Heart’ in the early 1990s, Yehoshua felt justified in taking a breather from attention paid in his works to issues of perceived social and political import. “I had exhausted totally all talk of settlements, Palestinians, whatever I had to say . . .” Like a South African writer weary after decades of chronicling apartheid and its demise, he says, it was time to say, “enough”. Though sales suggested Israeli readers appreciated his decision, he has returned to a preoccupation with his people. He is now busy with a historical novel about the encounter in Europe 1000 years ago between Jews from the East (or Sephardic, then 95 per cent) and those in the West (Ashkenazi, then just five per cent, mostly living in France, Germany and Italy). He talks of this project in terms of an examination of “genetic codes of conflict”. The new work is to be called ‘Voyage to the End of the Millenium’. He has set himself the task of looking at the cause of recurrent tensions, to examine “what is hidden behind what we call politics”. Yehoshua describes himself as “pre-Zionist”. He was born in Jerusalem where his father’s family had settled in the early 19th century. His mother migrated from Morocco just a few years before he was born in 1936. Constructed in four parts titled ‘Falling In Love’, ‘Marriage’, ‘Death’ and ‘Love’, ‘Heart’ is predominantly the first-person account of its protagonist, Benjy Rubin. Though interspersed with brief insights from an omniscient, third-person narrator, it little resembles the bold narrative experiments of that great chronicler of the American south, William Faulkner, to whom he has been likened. It has received praise from unexpected sources. India’s ambassador in Israel rang to compliment him on the accuracy of an account of travels in his country. Ironically, he has never been to India and based his descriptions on guide books and accounts by a son who had spent some months there. DETAILED description of open-heart surgery were based on many hours’ observation and he was proud to be invited to address a conference in Tel Aviv to be attended by 250 cardiologists. He prefaces his new novel with a quote from the Hindu scripture, ‘The Bhagavadgita’: “Set thy heart upon thy work/ But never on its reward./ Work not for a reward;/ But never cease to do thy work.” But his interest in eastern mysticism is limited. India was “only a kind of catalyst”. It was there to provide a necessary cultural shock to the protagonist, “so that he would start to live a little bit”. It was there too, as indicated in the title, to represent the necessary opening of the heart of a young protagonist who, until his reluctant visit, was far too rational, career-obsessed and unwilling to explore his emotional side. Yehoshua himself suggests a wariness with the East. His own son’s visit to India was brief. He cannot understand the frequency with which young Israelis go there on some personal quest. He can better understand a visit to Europe where there was a historical connection. But India? He has worries enough about his own children – two sons and a daughter – closer to home. Though proud that his sons had enlisted in elite units, he agonised over their respective roles in policing the Gaza Strip, from which Israel has withdrawn, and Hebron, on the West Bank, where its troops have remained along with the tiny minority of Jewish settlers asserting a claim to nearby graves of the Biblical patriarchs. He agonised over their predicament. What if one of his sons should fire a bullet that struck a child? “My father and mother were scared about me,” he says referring to his time as a paratrooper in the ’50s, “My anguish was double. I was not only afraid what the Arabs might do to them but what they might do to the Arabs.” Despite the recent clashes on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Yehoshua remains an optimist. For him the peace process seems irreversible – even after the assassination of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin last November. He says Rabin’s successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, cannot turn back. He and his psychoanalyst wife, Rivka, live on the slopes of Mount Carmel above the port city of Haifa that has few of the kinds of tension often found in his native Jerusalem. He has threatened, presumably in jest, that at times when Israel “is annoying me”, he would have Haifa declare its autonomy. He says that it epitomises the best of, and model for a future, Israel. In Haifa’s contrast of mountain and ocean he sees a metaphor for balance between secular and religious, Jew and Arab, and “still some sort of socialist tradition”. On the morning of our phone conversation, it is hot in Haifa. He inquires about our weather on a rainy mid-afternoon. He says he looks forward to his first visit to Australia. He has few preconceptions. He hopes to see plays and opera and discover literature he might include in his university courses. “Not only the kangaroos,” he says, “with all due respect to the kangaroos.” Spotlight on A. B. Yehoshua is on Friday at 10 am at the Malthouse. ‘Open Heart’ is published by Peter Halban Publishers. A TASTE OF “OPEN HEART” “If you’re getting bored,” Nakash whispered to me in the middle of the night in his heavily accented Iraqi Hebrew, “think of yourself as a pilot of the soul …” I had heard him speak like this about his role before, but now, in the depths of the night, a little groggy after long hours of intent concentration on the changing monitors of the anaesthesia machine, with the skull and brain not actually before my eyes but only flickering grayly on the suspended video screen, I felt that his words were ture. I had turned form a doctor into a pilot or a navigator, surrounded by nurses, who looked like well-groomed stewardesses in this private hospital, coming in every now and then to draw a little blood to measure the potassium and sodium levels, or to pour cocktails of pentothal or morphine into the suspended infusion bags, with special additions concocted by Nakash to ensure the tranquility of the “instrument flight.” – From “Open Heart”, by A. B. Yehoshua. The Sunday Age, 13-Oct-1996 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 