Customer Reviews

A Woman in Jerusalem

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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.

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

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.

Yehoshua's book is both amusing and deadly serious at the same time. His writing style is reminiscent of J. M. Coetzee and Saramago. He uses a straightforward, simple but poignant language that expresses so much through its brevity. The book truly paints a marvelous picture of a journey, one that represents the roots of many an Israeli resident.

Yehoshua accomplishes his tremendous illustration by painting a picture that is at once both Kafkaesque and surreal. He takes his protagonist, a human resource manager from a large Jerusalem bakery, through a journey all the way to the old Soviet Union. With him, he takes the body of a woman that died in Jerusalem in a terrorist bombing attack. The trip brings him in contact with the two living blood relatives of the dead woman and the ex-husband. Each meeting has a special character and each one drives the human resources manager to proceed in a specific direction.

In addition, Yehoshua makes certain commentary on the government and the Cold War. But the central theme of the book regards the attempt to give the body dignity under very difficult conditions, no matter what it takes. As there is "no choice" but to do what is necessary.

The book is recommended for all serious literature readers. It truly is one of the great works of the 21st Century to date. It is highly recommended.

A Jerusalem bombing results in the death of an unidentified woman, whom no one visited at the hospital while she was dying of her injuries. Unmourned, she remains in the local morgue for more than a week, until she is finally traced to the bakery where she worked. An aggressive newspaper reporter threatens to break the story of the unmissed employee, and the bakery's eighty-seven-year-old owner, furious at the story's implications of callousness, assigns the human resources manager to learn about the woman so that "a more tangible expression of regret from himself and his staff" can be made.The resources manager soon learns that Yulia Ragayev was a Russian engineer working on the bakery's night-time cleaning crew.

Creating empathy for Yulia, the author shows details about her life and those who have loved and abandoned her. He uses symbolic details to create parallels and contrasts--the warm, homey smell of the bakery contrasting with the smoky horrors of the bombing, the abandoned doll of a barefoot monk in Yulia's shack providing a touching parallel to the cold poverty of her own life. Serious thematic questions arise: Who is responsible for Yulia in Jerusalem? And if she is not solely responsible for her own life, how much, if anything, does anyone else owe her?

Eventually, the bakery owner demands a dignified funeral for Yulia, and he assigns the resources manager to escort her body back to her Russian village so she can be buried there. The timid human resources manager soon learns more than he ever bargained for about Yulia, life, bureaucracy, and ultimately, about the human resources he himself possesses. Wonderfully dark humor gradually emerges from the ironies that occur on the Russian journey, as Yehoshua emphasizes the continuing absurdity of life. Eventually, the novel becomes an almost slapstick noir comedy with the manager discovering that "Atonement was turning into lunacy."

Readers will celebrate the ending, as Yehoshua brings the action, themes, and characters full circle, showing the growth of the human resources manager, his pragmatism (learned on the trip), and his awareness of the larger mission with which he has been entrusted. This novel about "a dead temporary resident who believed in Jerusalem more than Jerusalem believes in itself" is one of the most satisfying novels I've read this year. n Mary Whipple

The abiding truth in this little novel is that Jerusalem is not a normal city and is claimed by many people. For Jews, Christians and Muslims it is a Holy City. For Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs it is the symbol of rightness and authority of who should be the 'Sextant' of the Holy Land. The 'Old City' is only one square mile of which the largest quarter (the Arab Quarter) contains Christianity's most sacred sites (the Via Delarossa) and eleven sects war over control of the 'Church of the Holy Sepulcher'. The Temple or Noble Mount where the 'Dome of the Rock' mosque resides is the site where Mohammed ascended to Heaven, where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac and was the site of the two Jewish Temples.

This story is not about any of these monumental questions, but what is owed to a non-combatant (a transient visitor) who is killed in a suicide bombing. She has not come to the city to fight for control, but to be part of this universal city. Her death served no one's purpose. In fact it was anonymous, because she wasn't identified for a week after the blast. She turns out to be a Russian Christian, who though trained as an engineer, was working as a cleaning woman in Jerusalem's largest bakery.

The owner, on finding that she was still on the company payroll from a 'nasty' article in a local paper accusing him of 'inhumanity', decides to send her home to be buried. The man who is to be the 'emissary' to the woman's home country is an ex-salesman who is now director of human resources. As we learn more about the woman, we also learn more about the director and the owner.

In his travels back to the woman's homeland, and eventually her hometown, the group taking the body back grows to seven. This is a mystical number and should not be dismissed as serendipity. When they finally reach her hometown...no read the book and find out for yourself.

The end of a journey is just the beginning of a new adventure. Life is a circle that no one knows the true ending of.

This is a book that gradually gets under your skin. The storyline is deceptively simple--a victim of a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem goes unmissed and unidentified for a week before a tabloid reveals her employer and levels an accusation of corporate indifference to her death. The humiliated employer decides to make amends, using his otherwise self-absorbed personnel director to "do the right thing" for the deceased employee. What follows is a humorous/serious saga that pulls spontaneous acts of generosity and humanity out of all the story's characters.

This is not a book with sharply drawn plot boundaries or a predictable course or ending, but it is ultimately enjoyable and heartwarming in so many ways that make it superior to most good popular novels (in my opinion). A.B. Yehoshua is one of the most interesting and creative minds at work in literature at the moment and has many works out that serious readers should find challenging and highly agreeable. Most of his books are translated from Hebrew, but that difficult work seems to be uniformly well done by a variety of collaborators.

A recently divorced man in Jerusalem is wrapped in the minutiae of his everyday concerns, the rigors of his job as the resource manager of a large bakery, maintaining a strict visitation schedule with his daughter and somehow filling the lonely hours of the nights. This is a conscientious, responsible man; although only in his early forties, his demeanor is that of a one of more mature years. Called to the office by the company's elderly owner, the resource manager is informed that an embarrassing newspaper article has been published: an employee of the company has been killed by a suicide bomber, her only identification the pay stub found clutched in her hand. The manager's mission is to apply himself to the immediate investigation of the woman's status and arrange for the appropriate arrangements, saving the company any further ignominy in the public's perception.

Without much effort, the resource manager discovers that the woman, a foreign engineer, has been working as a cleaning woman, somewhat ambiguously released by her immediate supervisor, but not officially terminated. Yulia Ragayev was a Tatar, come to Jerusalem with her lover, who later returned home; delighted with her new country, Yulia remained. What appears a simple task for the manager becomes fraught with difficulties, the delicate nature of her disposition of primary importance to the owner. The resource manager is dispatched, post haste, to resolve any legal issues and return the body for burial in her native land. Caught in an emotional conundrum, the manager finds himself involved with this fascinating foreigner, impressed by her bravery in her adopted country and the inherent complications of the burial, especially when Yulia's twelve-year-old son insists his grandmother be notified and brought from a distant village for the burial.

The journey the resource manager takes on behalf of this stranger, with whom he has fallen half in love, becomes an emotional adventure that opens his heart to a world he had blissfully ignored in his self-absorption. An emissary on a mission to set to rights an unfortunate situation, his heart and spirit expand with each mile closer to her homeland, experiencing a renaissance of the spirit, eagerly embracing Yulia's culture. Beautifully rendered with the subtle revelations of a man in the throes of a deep awakening, the author reclaims a humanity that transcends culture and ritual, the distinctly personal and rewarding engagement of a lonely man and the woman in his care, no obstacle too great in a quest for the fulfillment of a promise. Luan Gaines/2006.

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.

This is an absorbing, very well written, gripping--in a subtle sort of way--novel that tells the tale of the final disposition of a woman killed in a terrorist incident in Israel. The woman, when finally identified after a long interval through a newspaper story on her--turns out to be the employee of a large bakery in Jerusalem. The owner of the bakery, distraught over the woman's plight and the possible ill effects her situation could have on his business, directs his director of personnel to deal with the situation. This ultimately leads the personnel director to Russia for the woman's burial.

There are elements of obsession here in that the woman is by all accounts beautiful, intelligent and charismatic yet the personnel director, who on fact interviewed her, has no recollection of her at all. His attention to duty here has as much to do with his developing obsession with this corpse as it does with his professional obligations.

At its core the novel is an examination of the role of character in a violent urban world. The woman is the only person throughout the entire novel ever identified by name--everyone else is only a role or profession. Attached to this person in death the personnel director strives to identify and quantify her life before he achieves the final disposition of her remains.

On the whole I was very impressed with this book right up to the ending, which was anticlimactic and unfulfilling in the extreme. It's very frustrating to be taken in by a page turner--which this is--only to be totally frustrated in the end. Had this book ended more satisfactorily I would have given it a fifth star.

I've never read Yehoshua before but this novel was enrapturing enough for me to give some of his other efforts a try. Hopefully he's not going to turn out to be the master of the inept ending.