“Yehoshua seeks to present two worlds, those of Israel’s Jewish majority and its Arab minority. He has done it rather as Tolstoy wrote of war and peace: two novels, in a sense, yet intimately joined. Paradoxically — and paradox…is the book’s engendering force — the war is mainly reflected in the zestfully intricate quarrels in the Jewish part of the novel. The peace largely flowers when Rivlin finds himself breaking through the looking glass into the Arab story.”
“The Liberated Bride is tinged with the kind of innate, unavoidable suspense that the threat of bus bombs brings.”
“The boundaries that are broken down in The Liberated Bride include those within the self and others; mystical boundaries between self and God; political and cultural boundaries and finally, the stylistic boundaries of the novel itself, which Yehoshua is constantly stretching in different directions.”
“This novel has about it the force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece…”
“There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and powerful scenes — of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the purging of body and soul.”
“Mr Yehoshua’s A Woman in Jerusalem is a sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart — for other people as well as his own.”
“…a small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion.”
“Wonderfully dark humor gradually emerges from the ironies that occur… This is one of the most satisfying novels I’ve read this year.”
“an excellent, nicely tuned translation by Stuart Schoffman.”
“Mr Yehoshua, Israel’s most distinguished living novelist, is a dove. But he is one who, like his fellow writers Amos Oz and David Grossman, joins love for the unique qualities of his people with despair over their failure to make room politically and economically — but above all imaginatively — for the Arabs among them. With Mr Oz and Mr Grossman this despair comes out as a fine anger. With Mr Yehoshua … it comes out as a finer and ultimately more shattering Talmudic questioning.”
“Friendly Fire goes beyond Israeli and Jewish issues to touch on universal issues affecting all of humanity. Intensely realized, thoughtful, and stunning in its unique imagery and symbolism, this unusual novel deals with seemingly everyday issues, offering new insights into the human condition — life, love, and death …”
“… these lives haunted by loss are powerfully evoked.”
PART ONE
ADAM
And in the last war we lost a lover. We used to have a lover, and since the war he is gone. Just disappeared. He and his grandmother’s old Morris. And more than six months have passed and there has been no sign from him. We are always saying it’s a small, intimate country, if you try hard enough you’ll discover links between the most distant people — and now it’s as if the man has been swallowed up by the earth, disappeared without trace, and all the searches have been fruitless. If I was sure he had been killed, I would give up the search. What right have we to be stubborn about a dead lover, there are some people who have lost all that is dear — sons, fathers and husbands. But, how can I put it, still I’m convinced that he hasn’t been killed. Not him. I’m sure that he never even reached the front. And even if he was killed, where is the car, where has that disappeared to? You can’t just hide a car in the sand.
There was a war. That’s right. It came upon us a complete surprise. Again and again I read the confused accounts of what happened, trying to get to the bottom of the chaos that ruled then. After all, he wasn’t the only one who disappeared. To this day there is before us a list of so many missing, so many mysteries. And next of kin are still gathering last remnants — scraps of clothing, bits of charred documents, twisted pens, bullet-ridden wallets, melted wedding rings. Chasing after elusive eyewitnesses, after the shadow of a man who heard a rumour, trying in the mist to piece together a picture of their loved one. But even they are giving up the search. So what right have we to persist. After all, he’s a stranger to us. A doubtful Israeli, a deserter in fact, who returned to the country for a short visit to sort out some inheritance and stayed, perhaps also on our account. I don’t know, I can’t be sure. But I repeat, he hasn’t been killed. Of that I’m convinced. And that is the cause of the unease that has been eating at me these last months, that gives me no rest, that sends me out on the road in search of him. More than that: strange ideas occur to me on his account, that in the thick of the battle, in the confusion and disorder of units disbanding and regrouping, there were some — let’s say two or three — who took advantage of this confusion to break off and disappear. I mean, they simply decided not to return home, to abandon their old ties and go elsewhere.
It may seem a crazy idea, but not to me. You could say I’ve become an expert on this subject of missing persons.
Boaz, for example. Again and again since the cease-fire there has been that announcement in the papers about Boaz, who disappeared. Something like this: Mom and Dad are looking for Boaz. And a picture of a young man, a child almost, with short hair, a young soldier in the Tank Corps, and some astonishing details. At the beginning of the war on such and such a date he was seen in action in his tank in the front line in such and such a place. But ten days later, towards the end of the war, a childhood friend, a trusted friend, met him at a crossroads far from the front. They had a short conversation, and parted. And from that point on, Boaz’s traces have vanished.
A real mystery –
But we have hardened, reading announcements such as these in the papers, pausing for a moment and continuing with a weary glance to flick through the pages. This last war has made us numb.
But Boaz’s parents persist, and why shouldn’t they? For years they brought up a son, walked with him to the nursery, ran with him to the doctor, made sandwiches for him in the morning when he went away to the youth camp, waited for him at the railway station when he returned from a school trip. They washed and ironed and worried the whole time. Suddenly he disappears. And nobody can tell them where he is, what has happened to him. The whole system, nation, society, which absorbed him so voraciously, now begins to falter. And when the parents persist, and why shouldn’t they, a young officer is sent to them, well meaning no doubt but lacking experience. He arrives in a jeep and takes them, on a bright winter’s day, on a journey to the middle of the desert, driving long hours in silence deep into the wilderness, on roads that are not roads, through the dust and the desolation to a bare unmarked little mound of sand, vast emptiness all around. This officer boy goes red, stammers, here is where he was seen for the last time. See, even the dry rocks are broken in mourning. How is it possible …