A Woman in Jerusalem (Paperback)

~ A. B. Yehoshua (Author), (Translator) "EVEN THOUGH the manager of the human resources division had not sought such a mission, now, in the softly radiant morning, he grasped its unexpected..." (more)
Key Phrases: night shift supervisor, atomic shelter, immigration ministry, Yulia Ragayev, National Insurance, Mount Scopus (more...)

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 The Washington Post

It is a typically unfunny Middle Eastern irony that A.B. Yehoshua's entrancing new novel seems to have had its genesis as an exercise in imaginative sympathy about the terror-traumatized citizens of Jerusalem, written by probably the most famous resident of the comparatively tranquil city of Haifa. A Woman in Jerusalem then wound up being published in English at precisely the moment that Jerusalemites' hearts were going out to Haifa residents huddling in their bomb shelters beneath barrages of Hezbollah rockets. But while the novel is always aware of the sorrows of modern Israel, it soars on wry, wise wings far above the battered landscape.

How battered? Well, the heroine is a corpse: Yulia Ragayev, a fortyish, lovely, lonely worker in a Jerusalem bakery who's mortally wounded in a terrorist bombing in the city market, dies in a hospital after two days of solitude and then is left "in the hospital morgue abandoned and unidentified, her fate unmourned and her burial unprovided for." A muckraking local newspaper finds that she was identified only by her pay stub and assails the bakery for heartlessness in an exposé entitled "The Shocking Inhumanity Behind Our Daily Bread." The firm's wealthy old owner tells his melancholy human resource manager -- "a stocky man with a hard, weary face" -- to try to make amends by finding out what went wrong and by giving Yulia a proper funeral. (The novel's original title, translated from the Hebrew, is The Mission of the Human Resource Manager.) "At a time when pedestrians were routinely exploding in the streets," Yehoshua writes, "troubled consciences turned up in the oddest places."

A Woman in Jerusalem is a book about a mission and a memorial. Yulia is the only character to receive a name here; her son, ex-husband and mother are identified only by their roles, as are the human resource manager's daughter, mother and ex-wife, the bakery's owner, various bureaucrats and the odious, plot-triggering journalist himself, who is known throughout as "the weasel." This namelessness summons up memories of Israel's most famous memorial, the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, which takes its name from Isaiah 56:5, in which we are told that God will give those who cleave to Israel's covenant "a hand and a name." That includes, the prophet notes, strangers who join themselves to God, who will also have their sacrifices accepted upon the altar built on Jerusalem's holy mountain -- strangers, it seems, such as Yulia, a mechanical engineer of never entirely established Jewishness who immigrated to Israel from a nameless realm of the former Soviet Union. Yehoshua gives her a name, and the human resource manager tries, however belatedly, to give her a loving hand. To a wily old humanist like Yehoshua, there are no marginal deaths, no acceptable losses.

This may sound gloomy, but this dreamlike book turns out to be anything but: It's lively, fleet, sometimes funny and ultimately hopeful. Some of Yehoshua's older concerns -- such as the misgivings of Palestinians living in awkward proximity to the Jewish state, a major theme of his splendid previous novel The Liberated Bride -- are touched on in brilliantly light asides, such as the glimpse inside the mind of a young Arab dishwasher who's eager to sleep in the bakery's deserted cafeteria "without having to worry about the three humiliating checkpoints he had to pass through" to return to his West Bank village.

The book's faintly surreal quality persists as the human resource manager tries to make sense of Yulia's life. She turns out to be a largely ignored figure in the holy center of the world -- a woman in Jerusalem, not necessarily of it. The human resource manager's quest leads him inexorably to Yulia's birthland, a sort of anonymous Absurdistan still unnerved by Cold War fears of planetary annihilation. It is a deliberate step out of sacred time and space; the human resource manager's flight even leaves on Friday night, winging him away from Israel's day of Shabbat rest. And here, amid the "black slush," "low, leaden sky" and "arctic cold," he takes on a new essence: The human resource manager is now frequently referred to as "the emissary," a man sent to atone for our common coldness, an envoy dispatched a world away from Jerusalem's heat and light and violence to affirm that those who are murdered callously must not be mourned casually.

The result is a small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion. "I'd like a yes or no answer: are we guilty or not?" the bakery owner asks at one point. "Responsible is more like it," the human resource manager replies. "Responsible for what?" the old man wants to know. "I'll tell you later," replies the emissary.

Reviewed by Warren Bass
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. 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: 7.4 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #226,134 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 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 (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 7 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 (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Long Trip, December 22, 2006

By	Ethan Cooper (Big Apple) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Woman in Jerusalem (Hardcover)

A foreign worker is killed in a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem and the personnel manager at her employer becomes responsible for organizing the internment, due largely to his boss's generosity, compassion, and public relations savvy.

In summary, this sounds like the story of an unusual corporate assignment. But this misses what is probably the leading quality of the narrative, at least through the first two-thirds of the book. This is the relentless and annoying effort of peripheral characters to influence the actions of the personnel manager--largely by making arguments, some cynical and some sincere, to define the personnel manager's responsibility to this victim of terrorism.

For me, the effect of their efforts was to shift the narrative from a story of obstacles overcome to a story replete with aggravating meddling. You know what it's like when your strong minded relatives tell you how to perform a task you can handle competently yourself? Testy is the mood I carried through much of this novel.

At the same time, I'd fault Yehoshua for failing to pull motivation and meaning out of the actions of the characters. Yes, there are numerous declarations about compassion. But, these do not seem to flow from character. Likewise, the final section of the book contains a heavy handed imposition of philosophy and myth, which, once again, is external to the characters. Finally, there's lots of overt button pushing that surely resonates with many readers, as Yehoshua condemns characters for not trying hard enough or not doing enough for their children. Not subtle, one reviewer observed and I agree.

Nonetheless, this book does reward the persevering reader with a surprising and touching ending that also raises a valid question. Here comes a spoiler: But at the end of his novel, Yehoshua considers who rightfully belongs in Jerusalem.