Friendly Fire »

A. B. YEHOSHUA is one of Israel's preeminent writers. His novels include Journey to the End of the Millenium, The Liberated Bride, and A Woman in Jerusalem, which was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2007. He lives in Haifa.

A long-married couple are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Daniella has flown from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister with her brother-in-law Yirmiyahu, a retired diplomat. In short parallel chapters, alternating between Africa and Israel, the story follows the busy husband Amotz, a designer of elevators, as he juggles the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, children, and grandchildren. Alongside unfolds the confrontation between his wife and her anguished seventy-year-old brother-in-law, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by the "friendly fire" of his comrades. Now working as the manager of a team of African researchers digging from the bones of man's primate ancestors, Yirmiyahu desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.

With consummate artistry, A.B. Yehoshua has composed a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways.

The New York Times - Ethan Bronner

The depth—and burdens—of a full Jewish life in the only Jewish state form the central themes of Yehoshua's latest novel, Friendly Fire, a work that interlaces a depiction of almost aggressively ordinary day-to-day Israeli activity with an emotional and symbol-laden journey to that other bloody cradle of civilization, Africa. The two halves of the narrative aim to echo and complement each other, and when they do Yehoshua achieves a remarkable artistry. However, this isn't always the case. The result is a fine but flawed novel, rendered from the Hebrew in an excellent, nicely tuned translation by Stuart Schoffman.