FIVE SEASONS
Avraham B. Yehoshua
New York: Doubleday, 1989
360 pp., $19.95
For more than ten years now, Israeli readers have awaited with eager anticipation the appearance of every new novel by Avraham B. Yehoshua. This unusually keen interest on the part of a cosmopolitan readership long accustomed to a diet of predominantly foreign literature (either in the original or in Hebrew translation) is due to the fact that Yehoshua quickly established himself as a rare species among contemporary Israeli novelists: one whose works have universal appeal and meet the highest standards of modern world fiction.
Now, with the publication in English of Yehoshua's latest novel, Five Seasons, American readers can judge for themselves whether his popularity and critical acclaim in Israel are justified. Yehoshua may have come to the attention of American readers through the six chapter essay he wrote as accompanying text for Israel, Frenchman Frederic Brenner's high-quality album of photographs that offers a visual homage to Israel on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of its independence (Harper & row Publishers, New York, 1988). Or through his two earlier novels, The Lover and a Late Divorce, and the book of essays Between Right and Right, which Doubleday has published in English over the last ten years.
Hailed upon its publication in 1987 as a major literary event, Five Seasons continues to be one of Israel's top best-sellers. Its main character, Molkho, like Yehoshua himself, is a Jerusalem-born Sephardic Jew living in the northern port city of Haifa. Molkho is married to a German-born woman who dies of cancer as the story begins.
Molkho's wife died at 4 a.m., and Molkho did his best to
mark the moment forever, because he wished to be able to
remember it. And indeed, thinking back on it weeks and
even months later, he was convinced he had managed to
refine the instant of her passing (her passing? He wasn't
sure the word was right) into something clear and vivid
containing not only thought and feeling but also sound and
light, such as the maroon glow of the small electric
heater, the greenish radiance of the numbers on the digital
clock, the yellow shaft of light from the bathroom that
cast large shadows in the hallway, and perhaps, too, the
color of the sky, a pinkish ivory set of by the deep
obscurity around it. He would have liked to think he
recalled the dark morning sky because it added a stirring,
elemental touch of nature, but he could not be sure of it,
any more than he could be of the whisper of the wind and
the rain; yet he was certain that there had been
...
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