Mr. Mani

Mr. Mani
Author: A. B. Yehoshua
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 383
Release: 1993-05-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547542453

New York Times Notable Book: A story of six generations of a Jewish family, by an author Saul Bellow called “one of Israel’s world-class writers.” In this novel, a winner of both the National Jewish Book Award and the first Israeli Literature Prize, A. B. Yehoshua weaves a deeply affecting family saga and an portrait of Jewish life over the past two centuries. The story moves backward through time, unfolding over the course of five conversations. On a kibbutz in the Negev in 1982, a student describes her strange meeting with her boyfriend’s father, Judge Gavriel Mani. On German-occupied Crete in 1944, a Nazi soldier recounts his attempts to hunt down the Mani family. In Jerusalem in 1918, a Jewish lawyer in the British army briefs his commanding officer on the forthcoming trial of the political agitator Yosef Mani. In a village in southern Poland in 1899, a young doctor reports back to his father on his travels, and on his sister’s romance with Dr. Moshe Mani. And in Athens in 1848, Avraham Mani reveals the heartbreaking tale of the death of his son, Yonef, in Jerusalem. Alfred Kazin hailed Mr. Mani as “one of the most remarkable pieces of fiction I have ever read.” Named as one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly, it is both an absorbing tale and a powerful statement about family, faith, and the weight of history. Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin

The Tunnel

The Tunnel
Author: Abraham B. Yehoshua
Publisher: HarperVia
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1328622630

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a suspenseful and poignant story of a family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father--an engineer who they discover is involved in an ominous secret military project Until recently, Zvi Luria was a healthy man in his seventies, an engineer living in Tel Aviv with his wife, Dina, visiting with their two children whenever possible. Now he is showing signs of early dementia, and his work on the tunnels of the Trans-Israel Highway is no longer possible. To keep his mind sharp, Zvi decides to take a job as the unpaid assistant to Asael Maimoni, a young engineer involved in a secret military project: a road to be built inside the massive Ramon Crater in the northern Negev Desert. The challenge of the road, however, is compounded by strange circumstances. Living secretly on the proposed route, amid ancient Nabatean ruins, is a Palestinian family under the protection of an enigmatic archaeological preservationist. Zvi rises to the occasion, proposing a tunnel that would not dislodge the family. But when his wife falls sick, circumstances begin to spiral . . . The Tunnel--wry, wistful, and a tour de force of vital social commentary--is Yehoshua at his finest.

Five Seasons

Five Seasons
Author: A. B. Yehoshua
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2012-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0544139909

This tale of an awkward Israeli widower and his misadventures with women is an “extraordinary novel . . . a masterpiece” (Los Angeles Times). After seven long years of illness, Molkho’s wife passes, leaving him in mourning, but also with an unexpected sense of freedom. No longer is he bound to being a caretaker for a woman too sick to even bear his touch. His future—and his desires—are his own. As the seasons of his life propel the hapless middle-aged accountant through a series of journeys and a string of infatuations—with an unwanted wife, an aggressive bureaucrat, a young girl, and a Russian émigré—Molkho begins to find the real element that was missing in his life was not romance, but his own will. An absurd, tragic, humorous, and hopeful meditation on love, marriage, and the quiet struggles of average Israeli lives, Five Seasons “reconfirms [A. B. Yehoshua’s] status as a shrewd analyst of domestic ordeals” (Publishers Weekly).

Swami and Friends

Swami and Friends
Author: R. K. Narayan
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2012-07-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345803795

R. K. Narayan (1906—2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. Swami and Friends introduces us to Narayan’s beloved fictional town of Malgudi, where ten-year-old Swaminathan’s excitement about his country’s initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardor for cricket and all other things British. Written during British rule, this novel brings colonial India into intimate focus through the narrative gifts of this master of literary realism.

Open Heart

Open Heart
Author: A.B. Yehoshua
Publisher: Halban Publishers
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2012-07-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1905559496

Open Heart is a psychological tour de fource about love and the nature of man's soul. From the opening lines of this first-person narrative, the reader is propelled into the mind of Dr. Benjamin Rubin, an ambitious young internist, who is jockeying for position with the hospital's top surgeons. But it isn't until Benjy learns that his position has been terminated, and that he has been selected to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife to India to retrieve their ailing daughter, that Yehoshua sets his hero on a journey of self-discovery.

Facing the Fires

Facing the Fires
Author: Bernard Horn
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780815604938

In Facing the Fires, Bernard Horn introduces A. B. Yehoshua, Israel’s greatest living novelist, to an English-speaking audience. Yehoshua is also his country’s most audacious thinker about politics, culture, history, and Jewish identity. Yehoshua’s achievement has been recognized throughout the world, and he has been awarded literary prizes in both Israel and the United States. A lively, controversial, and prophetic voice in his homeland, Yehoshua rigorously tests his community’s deepest pieties: religion, Zionism, and the agony of the Holocaust. A Jew who does not believe in God, he is a committed Zionist and member of the “peace camp” in Israel that welcomed the Palestinian uprising of 1987. In the tradition of the Paris Review interviews, Horn’s conversations with Yehoshua reveal the intricate play of literary, psychological, mythological, and political motifs in the novelist’s work. Stimulated by a warm friendship between the two scholars, the intellectual energy of Facing the Fires offers readers a pleasure they might expect only from fiction.

A Journey to the End of the Millennium

A Journey to the End of the Millennium
Author: A.B. Yehoshua
Publisher: Halban Publishers
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2012-07-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 190555950X

The year is 999 A.D. Christians in Europe are preparing themselves for the arrival of the Messiah at the millennium and religious fervour is in the air. Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership because of his new wife's distrust of the dual marriage of Ben Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour and, equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his way of life. A confrontation ensues between people of different cultures whose ways of living and loving are so different, and yet who are of the same religion, believe in the same God and in the same morality. Thus we enter a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate deeply with our times. A. B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval world with its merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of one man's love is lyrical, erotic even, and A Journey to the End of the Millennium will rank with the best of Yehoshua's work.

Conversations with Mani Ratnam

Conversations with Mani Ratnam
Author: Baradwaj Rangan
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2013-12-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 8184756909

Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan is among Time’s ‘100 Best Movies Ever’; and Roja launched A.R. Rahman. This book, unique to Indian cinema, illuminates the genius of the man behind these and eighteen other masterly films. For the first time ever, Mani Ratnam opens up here, to Baradwaj Rangan, about his art, as well as his life before films. In these freewheeling conversations—candid, witty, pensive, and sometimes combative—many aspects of his films are explored. Ratnam elaborates in a personal vein on his choice of themes, from the knottiness in urban relationships (Agni Natchatiram) to the rents in the national fabric (Bombay); his directing of children (Anjali); his artful use of songs; his innovative use of lighting; as also his making of films in Hindi and other languages. There are fond recollections of collaborations with stalwarts like Balu Mahendra, P.C. Sreeram, Thotta Tharrani and Gulzar, among many others. And delectable behind-the-scenes stories—from the contrasting working styles of the legendary composer Ilaiyaraaja and Rahman to the unexpected dimensions Kamal Haasan brought to the filming of Nayakan to what Raavan was like when originally conceived. In short, like Mani Ratnam’s films, Conversations surprises, entertains and stimulates. With Rangan’s personal and impassioned introduction setting the Tamil and national context of the films, and with posters, script pages and numerous stills, this book is a sumptuous treat for serious lovers of cinema as well as the casual moviegoer looking for a peek behind the process.

The Extra

The Extra
Author: A.B. Yehoshua
Publisher: Halban Publishers
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2016-02-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1905559801

An experiment is under way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a woman, recently widowed, is starting a trial period in assisted living, mainly to placate her over-anxious son, whilst in Jerusalem her daughter Noga, a young harpist, returns from her job with a Dutch orchestra to look after the family apartment. To enliven her stay, Noga's brother finds work for her - playing roles as an extra in film, TV, and in the opera Carmen. The random roles Noga is thrust into resonate strangely with her own life which she begins to re-evaluate. Central to her past is the fact that she refused to have children, resulting in the break-up of her marriage. No-one in her family understood her motives for not wanting children and everyone has a different explanation for it. Now, a chance encounter with her former husband reveals his continuing powerful, love as well as a shocking deed she committed during their marriage. But Noga is a free spirit neither tied to the past nor defined by it, and always keen to push boundaries. She lives for her music and is willing to go wherever it takes her. The three-month experiment proves as much of a test for her as for her mother and both are radically transformed by the end. A.B. Yehoshua is as creative, humorous and provocative as ever in The Extra, exploring themes familiar to him of love, family relationships and artistic ambitions, set mainly in an ever-changing Jerusalem.

The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua

The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua
Author: Yael Halevi-Wise
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271088621

Once referred to by the New York Times as the “Israeli Faulkner,” A. B. Yehoshua’s fiction invites an assessment of Israel’s Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel’s leading novelist. Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua’s artistic growth, Yael Halevi-Wise calls for a systematic appreciation of the author’s major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua’s novels as reflections on the “condition of Israel,” constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic. Each of the book’s seven chapters employs a different interpretive method to showcase how Yehoshua’s constructions of character psychology, social relations, national history, and historiosophic allusions to traditional Jewish symbols manifest themselves across his novels. The book ends with a playful dialogue in the style of Yehoshua’s masterpiece, Mr. Mani, that interrogates his definition of Jewish identity. Masterfully written, with full control of all the relevant materials, Halevi-Wise’s assessment of Yehoshua will appeal to students and scholars of modern Jewish literature and Jewish studies.