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One would think from all the brouhaha about the imminent arrival of Y2K that the world had never experienced a change of millennium. In fact, we've been through it all before, as A.B. Yehoshua reminds us in his novel, A Journey to the End of the Millennium. The year is 999 and the protagonist is Ben Attar, a North African Jewish merchant who has, for many years, been in profitable partnership with his nephew Abulafia and a Muslim trader named Abu Lutfi. But when Abulafia marries a German Jew who disapproves of his uncle's two wives, the partnership is suddenly dissolved and Ben Attar finds himself out of business.
Abulafia's repudiation of his uncle sets the stage for Ben Attar's journey into the heart of Europe at the turn of the millennium. Accompanied by a rabbi, both his wives, and Abu Lutfi, our hero sails to Paris, where he hopes to persuade his nephew's wife that his marriage to two women is both legally and morally permissible. Yehoshua's tale is more than just a travelog through the Europe of the 10th century; it is also a meditation on religion, law, and the differences between the European Sephardic tradition and that of the Middle Eastern Ashkenazic Jews--differences that echo the current social and ideological conflicts within Israel today.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Eminent Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart) offers a provocative, if somewhat ponderous parable about the birth of modern morality, women's rights and the prospects for Jewish survival. In A.D. 999, Ben Attar, a wealthy Jewish merchant from Tangier, embarks on a perilous voyage to Paris accompanied by his two wives, his Arab partner, a rabbi from Seville and a young black slave. His goal is to convince his nephew and ex-business partner, Raphael Abulafia, that bigamy (common among Arabs and not unheard-of among medieval Jews, we are told) is an honorable practice; that it's possible to love two wives equally and fairly. Raphael's wife, Esther-Minna, a worldly-wise Frankish widow, is morally repulsed by Ben Attar's bigamy, hence the business partnership's rupture. Punctuated by sultry lovemaking scenes and wondrously suffused with the customs, beliefs, food and medicine of the Middle Ages, the novel's spiritual compass navigates between a variety of polarities: the industrious, puritanical north and the sensual, easygoing south; Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewry; Christians and Jews; and medieval and modern mores. Ben Attar may be a decent, honest man by the standards of his time, but from our vantage point, he is fundamentally self-deluded. His two wives are nameless, veiled, shadowy figures, and he uneasily acquiesces when, on the return voyage, his Arab partner discloses newly acquired human cargo: eight slaves shackled in the ship's hold. That these are fair-skinned slaves only compounds the ironies as Yehoshua explores the anatomy of prejudice, desire, passion and self-righteousness. The overwritten story, which holds up a mirror to our own millennial angst, is nearly shipwrecked by serpentine, stately prose, a near-total absence of dialogue and deadweight descriptive passages.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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