A Woman in Jerusalem [Paperback]

A. B. Yehoshua (Author), Hillel Halkin (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2007

A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery’s owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman’s life take shape—she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful—he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love.

At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.

(20060601)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Israel's master novelist (Mr. Mani) tells a spellbinding tale about a spellbinding woman whose luminous smile, swan's neck and Tatar eyes are so beguiling that even in death she can lead a man to fall in love with her. The woman is Yulia Ragayev, a Slavic immigrant to Israel who has been killed in a terrorist bombing and whose corpse lies unidentified in a morgue for a week. The man (who, like everyone in the novel except Yulia, remains nameless) is the human resources manager at the commercial bakery where Yulia worked as a cleaning woman. A muckraking article forces the bakery's owner to discover her identity and take action to restore her dignity. The owner orders the HR director to return Yulia's body to her son and mother in her native land for burial—a journey that turns into an opportunity for moral redemption for him after a series of stunning reversals. Throughout, Yulia remains a mystery: why did she come to, and cling to, Jerusalem when she wasn't Jewish? Questions of morality, dignity, identity, nationality and belonging are subtly explored in sometimes hallucinatory prose, fluently translated by Halkin. This short novel's layers reveal themselves only gradually and, once revealed, continue to compel and provoke. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Renowned Israeli writer Yehoshua performs a bold improvisation on the basic plotline of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and casts light on Israel's bloody history and cultural conflicts. The hero of this smart, suspenseful seriocomic tale of guilt, penance, and public relations is the human resources manager of a major Jerusalem company. When the 87-year-old owner learns that a local newspaper is about to run a scathing article about a company employee, a beautiful Russian who was killed by a suicide bomber and whose body remains unclaimed, he directs the human resources manager to find out what happened and make amends, no expenses spared. And so begins a sequence of ludicrous if well-meant mishaps as the manager mounts an improbable and risky expedition to return Yulia Ragayev's body to her isolated Soviet village, a journey that includes a surreal stopover at an obsolete Russian atomic-bomb shelter. Tautly composed in a manner akin to Kafka and Babel, Yehoshua's brilliant under-your-skin satire subtly evokes thoughts of war and terrorism, vulnerability and fate, the sacred and the profane. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (August 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156031949
• ISBN-13: 978-0156031943
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #821,380 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "What is left to us if we lose our humanity?", August 12, 2006

By 

E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Woman in Jerusalem (Hardcover)

In A. B. Yehoshua's "A Woman in Jerusalem," a local newspaper publishes a scathing article in which a reporter denounces the owner of a commercial bakery for not missing one of his employees when she no longer shows up for work. It turns out that this individual was a cleaning lady who was killed in a terrorist bombing. The eighty-seven year old owner is mortified and conscience stricken by what he considers his company's dereliction of duty. He calls in his human resources manager and tells him to do whatever he can to set things right.

Thus begins this whimsical and touching tale that launches the unnamed human resources manager on a strange odyssey. The fact that no one in the novel except the bombing victim is given a name lends the novel an allegorical feel. The dead woman is Yulia Ragayev, a mechanical engineer who emigrated from the former Soviet Union, and was subsequently granted temporary residence status in Israel. She lived in a run down shack in Jerusalem, and cleaned the bakery at night. Yulia was resigned to being separated from her thirteen-year old son, who had gone back to his mother's native country.

The human resources manager looks into the entire matter, at his boss's behest. He visits the morgue where the body lay for days, unclaimed, and he confronts the reporter who broke the story. He seeks answers to these questions: Why was the victim found with a pay stub from the bakery when the night manager claims that he had fired her a month earlier? Why was an obviously intelligent person like Yulia living in Jerusalem while holding such a menial job? Who will take responsibility for arranging her burial and where should she be buried? The human resources manager gradually pieces together the facts of Yulia's life and death, and he subsequently does whatever he can to provide closure for her next of kin.

"A Woman in Jerusalem" is a moving story of how humanity can blossom in the midst of a faceless bureaucracy. Theoretically, no one should care that Yulia is dead. She was a solitary woman, with no relatives in Israel. Yet, after the newspaper article appears, many people work together to give Yulia the dignity and recognition in death that she lacked in life.

Yehoshua avoids sentimentality, and he fills his book with satirical and gently humorous passages, lovely descriptive writing, and psychological insight. The old bakery owner is terrified of death, and he hopes that his belated concern for Yulia and her family will bring him peace of mind. The human resources director is a lonely and lost man, divorced with an only daughter. He would rather not have gotten involved in this whole mess. Yet, gradually, he finds himself drawn to Yulia, and he realizes that his mission has brought him a feeling of satisfaction that he had previously lacked. This is a simple story whose theme may be that acts of mercy towards strangers can have enormous impact. We must strive to achieve redemption and make an effort to love one another; only then can we hope to survive with our humanity intact in an increasingly tempestuous and hostile world.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Search for Love and Place, April 4, 2008

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Woman in Jerusalem (Hardcover)

A. B. Yehoshua's novel, "A Woman in Jerusalem" raises a number of difficult themes -- the nature of love, the search for identity, the importance of place -- but explores them unconvincingly. I don't think the novel succeeds.

The story involves a dead non-Jewish woman, Yulia Ragayev,in her late 40s who had immigrated to Jersualem with her Jewish lover and her son from a former marriage. When her lover and son leave she opts to remain and is killed in an attack by suicide bombers. Although trained as an engineer, Yulia has taken a job as a cleaning woman with a large bakery company, whose parent company also makes newsprint. Upon her death, she is traced to the company, and an opportunistic news reporter, the "weasel" is going to publish an article faulting the company for not showing more compassion towards its employee.

Only Yulia is named in the novel with the other characters identified by their functions, such as the "weasel", the "office manager", and, the chief character "the human resources manager". A theme of the book thus seems to be the anonymity of modern life. The owner of the company, out of a mixture of genuine compassion and self-interest for his business, charges the human resources manager to learn Yulia's story and make appropriate amends on behalf of the company. The human resources manager ultimately travels with Yulia's coffin to an obscure village in Russia in the depth of winter, where he encounters the Israeli counsul, Yulia's ex-husband, her son, and her mother.

The book tells of the outward journey of the human resources manager to secure a proper burial for Yulia and his inward journey to find himself. The human resources manager, in his early 40s, has just been divorced and is living with his mother while he prowls the pubs in the evenings in search of a new relationship. He worries about his teenage daughter. He had interviewed Yulia and given her a job but had no memory of her. In particular, because he was wrapped up in himself and his own troubles, he missed her beauty and her charisma which was apparent to everyone else. But he becomes attracted to her, in her death, in attempting to give her a proper burial, and in the process he tries to understand what he himself wants from life.

There are many threads and evocative moments in the book, but they mostly don't lead anywhere and the story doesn't come together. One of the better moments was a scene near the end of the novel where the human resources manager and the reporter ("weasel") discuss Plato. The two men had been students in philosophy classes at the university. The reporter, for all his cynicism, has been working for years on a dissertation of Plato's Phaedo, a dialogue which discusses the fate of the soul after death. He and the human resources manager have a discussion about Plato's Symposium, and its treatment of human love and its relationship to the eternal. With an ironic wink in his eye, Yehoshua has the weasel say that "Platonic love has been mined to exhaustion." (p. 186). A little later in the conversation, the weasel observes that "that's love's secret. There is no forumla. Each person has to find the secret for himself. That's why Eros is neither god nor man.... yet he links the human to the divine, the temporal to the eternal." (pp 187-188) The theme of the soul's immortality in Plato's Phaedo and of the nature of love and eros in the Symposium capture many of the themes of this novel.

Yehoshua's book reminded me of Jose Saramago's novel "All the Names", in which all the primary characters except for the main character, are, likewise, nameless. In Saramago's book, a lonely and alienated clerk in the General Registry becomes obsessed with and searches for a beautiful woman who has died. Saramago's and Yehosua's books use many of the same devices and, in their pictures of anonymity and loneliness, emphasize the need in human life for connectedness and love. Readers interested in the themes Yehoshua treats may enjoy Saramago's fine novel.

Robin Friedman

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rich and evocative, August 6, 2007

By 

J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Woman in Jerusalem (Paperback)

A woman is murdered in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, her body long unclaimed, a journalist traces her to a bakery where she once worked and was not in death missed. The burial of this woman, Yulia Ragayev, the only person in this wonderful novel to have a name, launches the tale. The Bakery's Human Resource Director must find out who she was and what was her relationship to the bakery, in the process becoming emotionally attached to her. Indeed, it is a testament to Yehoshua's skills how well he brings this dead woman to life as a character in the story without using flashbacks or others recounting long memories of her.

To tell much more would give to much away about this engaging humorous story. A note should be said about those reviewers who complain that "A Woman in Jerusalem" lacked subtlety or depth. To say that this story is simple would be akin to saying that Carver's "What We Talk About when We Talk about Love" is about two couples having a drink or "Ulysses" is about a day in Dublin. The subtle layers of Yehoshua's novel contain much richness and thought, along with a great deal of pathos. Indeed, one must be impressed at the humanity and humor he brings to a subject as overwhelming as terrorism. Serious readers will not be disappointed.