Getting a divorce is not an easy decision, even though it sometimes looks and sounds like a soap opera. Some countries also have a very committed approach to the status of marriage and prohibit divorce or make it so difficult to obtain that couples stay together rather than engage in a difficult and costly procedure. Jewish law is even more particular in as much as the married couple must first obtain a religious divorce before getting a civil divorce.
A.B. Yehoshua’s novel is a masterful piece on such a subject. An old Israeli man comes back to Israel after a long absence to get a divorce from his institutionalized wife. This very short trip will last one week, culminating with Passover. It can also be seen as a parallel for the creation of the world: seven days to create the world, seven days to end a marriage and start another life thinks Yehouda, the divorce-seeking father. Each member of this very ordinary Israeli family relates the events in his or her voice: the young grandson, the son-in-law, the sons, the daughter-in-law, the daughter, the estranged wife, the father, even the son’s lover. By letting each character speaks out, Yehoshua brings to the surface many controversial aspects of Israeli life: the social and ethnic disdain with which Ashkenazi Jews consider Sephardic Jews, the intellectual contempt in which non-religious Jews keep their religious brothers, the distance between Diaspora Jews living in relative security in America and Israeli Jews confronted to economic hardship. Of course, with utmost respect for the protagonists, Yehoshua also manages to give us hindsight on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
However Jewish law seems at odds with the Western average view on divorce, other themes in the book explore the feud between tradition and modernity currently on-going in our Judeo-Christian society: Tsvi, the eldest son, is homosexual and his lover is a middle-aged family man who discovers his own sexual orientation late in life, as a distorted mirror-image of Yehouda seeking a late divorce. Asi, the youngest son, is a clichéd image of the Russian intellectual, with his quest for the permanent Laws of History and his over infatuation with his beautiful virgin wife Dina. Asi reminds the reader of both John Savage’s character in Andrei Konchalovsky’s movie Maria’s Lover as well as the rabbi allowed to seek “relief of unbearable urges” in the short story of the same name by Nathan Englander. The men in A Late Divorce are all poignant and moving, even Kedmi, the ever cynical son-in-law whose tactless jokes are an offense to the world’s greatest Jewish humorists, a sort of Woody Allen wannabe who would feel more at home in Manhattan than in Haifa. Amongst the female characters, Yehouda’s estranged and institutionalized wife remains a mystery: we are not convinced that she is mentally sick, or senile, or a psychopath, nor do we really get to understand the nature of her feelings towards Yehouda, or the reasons of her past and present actions. The reader is undecided when it comes to Ya’el and Dina, Yehouda’s daughter and daughter-in-law. Dina’s unbelievable status of virgin wife is not without reminding the reader of other religious stories, even though she might only be suffering from a medical condition that prevents her from fulfilling her conjugal duties. Each couple in the book, separated or living together, is an acute unnerving representation of the general society. They could be living next door to us, be adepts of other religions. They share universal motivations for their actions as well as universal values and dreams.
The oddest chapter in the book occurs when the narration suddenly jumps three years ahead, with the colorful but fleeting appearance of Yehouda’s American love interest, Connie, the woman for whom he was seeking a late divorce and his posthumous son. Because their appearance break the chronological narration, the reader‘s interest is even more teased. It is only through this chapter that the reader will understand that the seven days of Yehouda’s trip back to Israel had an unexpected ending. At the end of the story, one cannot but feel sorry for Yehouda that the rejuvenating experience he was enjoying in America with Connie will know an abrupt and even more incomprehensible end.
A. B. Yehoshua’s style is reminiscent of Faulkner in as much as he uses a polyphonic approach to narration. At times the characters are telling us what is happening, or dialoguing in front of our eyes, through their point of view, with another person. When Tsvi’s lover is given a voice, the chapter seems to be an exchange between him and Tsvi, and then him and Yehouda: the reader quickly realizes that he has access to only Tsvi’s lover’s words. The dialogue is in fact a self-introspecting monologue in a monumental tour de force. At other times they let us get inside their rambling thoughts: punctuation becomes sparse, to imitate the state of the mind, in a manner also found in James Joyce’s Ulysses. A. B. Yehoshua highly deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature.
© Sarah Diligenti-Pickup, October 2006
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