Like his contemporaries Aharon Appelfeld and Amos Oz, Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua explores universal dilemmas that have been at the forefront of debate in his native country for decades. His often controversial views on Israeli identity and culpability have earned him fierce criticism at home and abroad, though he is widely regarded as one of Israel’s greatest living writers. His latest, A Woman in Jerusalem, displays many of his signature humanitarian concerns, and also shows off his Kafka influence to good effect. It centers on an anonymous victim of a suicide bombing who turns out to be a Slavic immigrant who had been working as a cleaning woman. An unnamed bureaucrat is dispatched to unravel the mystery and return the woman’s body to her family—a strange journey is marked by moral uncertainties, anguish, and genuine tenderness for a woman who had no real stake in Israel’s politics.
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