A.B. Yehoshua

Avraham B. Yehoshua, known commonly as A.B. Yehoshua, was an Israeli novelist and playwright.

Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem on December 19, 1936, to a fifth-generation Jerusalem family of Sephardi origin. He attended Gymnasia Rehavia municipal high school in Jerusalem. Afterward, he served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army from 1954 to 1957, seeing action in the 1956 Suez War.

In 1959, he met his future wife, Rivka Karni.

From the end of his military service, Yehoshua began to publish fiction. His first book of stories, Mot Hazaken (The Death of the Old Man), was published in 1962.

Yehoshua studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He taught at high school and university levels and taught in Paris while living there from 1963 to 1967. From 1972, he taught Comparative and Hebrew Literature at the University of Haifa. In 1975, he was a writer-in-residence at St Cross College, Oxford. He also was a visiting professor at Harvard (1977), the University of Chicago (1988, 1997, 2000), and Princeton (1992).

Best known as a novelist and playwright, A.B. Yehoshua was among the most widely recognized Israeli authors internationally. He became a prominent figure in the “new wave” generation of Israeli writers, who differed from their predecessors in focusing more closely on individual and interpersonal concerns rather than group psychology. He was often associated as a member of the “literary trio” with Amos Oz and David Grossman.

The New York Times described Yehoshua as “a kind of Israeli Faulkner.” His writing established him as one of Israel’s foremost authors, a novelist with a particular gift for capturing the mood of contemporary Israel. In a style that has been called “anti-stream of consciousness,” he explored the animal instincts which threaten the facade of civilized people and examined their isolation from each other, their community, and themselves.

The Financial Times said of Five Seasons, “the novel succeeds in charting the ways in which grief and passions cannot be cheated.” The Village Voice wrote, “Yehoshua’s stories find their way right into the unconscious ... Nobel prizes have been given for less.” In the words of critic Alan Lelchuk, A.B. Yehoshua is “trying to break through the deeper circles of feeling, to meanings beyond the cerebral or stale.”

Yehoshua wrote eleven novels, three books of short stories, four plays, and four collections of essays. His works have been translated and published in 28 countries; many have been adapted for film, television, theatre, and opera.