Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989 by Gaëlle Fisher (review)

Abstract

A. B. Yehoshua, who passed away recently, was one of the pillars of Israeli literature, and his death marks the end of a generation of authors, among them Amos Oz, who, each in his own way, took the role of “the watchman over the house of Israel,” by contemplating and often criticizing, in their works and in their political and cultural activity, the “Israeli condition.” This integrative volume presents a finegrained analysis of Yehoshua’s stance as a writer who targets historical and cultural dilemmas in Jewish and Israeli existence. It shows that although Yehoshua’s work as a whole is heterogenic—it ranges from short stories to novellas and novels, from nonrealistic to realistic, from first person to third person to polyphonic strategies, and from historical novels to contemporary settings—there is a deepseated unity as though all of Yehoshua’s narratives had been coded in the same way.