When The Liberated Bride was published in Hebrew in 2001, it was made the subject of a brutal vivisection in the prominent Israeli broadsheet Haaretzby Yitzhak Laor, a radical anti-establishment Tel Aviv poet and literary critic. Laor’s 3000-word attack slated the novel as the literary equivalent of ethnic cleansing in its “ferocious, racist hatred of Arabs”. Laor is briefly lampooned in the novel as a formidable but ruthless intellectual who exploits the Israel-Palestine conflict to settle scores with his adversaries.
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The vendetta, one suspects, is as political as it is personal. Despite his standing as a stalwart of the Israeli Left and as a long-term campaigner for the creation of a Palestinian state, Yehoshua has also been one of the country’s most vociferous dvocates of Ariel Sharon’s security wall through the West Bank. It is a policy Laor equates in his review to “the ghettoisation of the Palestinians”.
The Liberated Bride is an allegory about the need for borders. The novel explores the violation of boundaries existing between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and teachers and students, as well as the muddying of cultural barriers between Israel’s Arab minority and its Jewish population. Each comes to stand for Yehoshua’s belief in the imperative of a wall separating the two peoples. His characters are never extricable from their political context. Their relationships function as metaphors for the challenges of the Jewish state.
Yehoshua’s militant Zionism at times finds him at loggerheads with the younger generation of Israeli writers, who often fail to share that traditional Israeli conception of the writer as prophet. Chief among Yehoshua’s critics is the Tel Aviv wunderkind Etgar Keret. Where Yehoshua composes epic tomes that stridently draw attention to their political significance, Keret’s micro-stories flaunt their irreverence in hip rebellion against the ideological zeal of the generation that came of age with the state.
The two writers were recently brought together on a panel at a conference in Greece, where a wrangle ensued over Yehoshua’s disparaging attitude towards the Jews of the Diaspora. Keret stressed the affinities binding the Jewish people, while Yehoshua maintained his controversial belief that exile is the “disease” of Judaism for which Zionism is the sole “cure”. His books might distil the alienation and despair of contemporary Israel, its idealism dried up and replaced by a soul-destroying cynicism, but Yehoshua’s Zionist fever has lost none of its heat. It is the borderlessness of the Jewish people and the resulting vagueness in their identity that Yehoshua holds to be the root cause of their historic persecution.
“Because there is something unclear in their identity, the anti-Semite can easily project his problems, his fantasies on the Jew. The Jew is like a text with a lot of gaps. As a Zionist, I know our purpose is to be among ourselves and not to wander again in the world. The Diaspora Jews have to know that the structure of their identity invites anti-Semitism. They need to decide themselves if the price is too high.”
His persistent call for the Israeli Government to dismantle the settlements in the occupied territories derives from this principle. “Because we wanted to grab a bit of territory from the Palestinians, Israel betrayed the most sacred rule of Zionism – we broke our borders.”
Only by living within the clear boundaries of Israel does he believe the pathological impulses of anti-Semitism can be stemmed: “The Palestinians are hating us, but they don’t have these anti-Semite fantasies.”
For Keret, Yehoshua’s position on the Diaspora Jew is ostensibly “a case of asking the victim to take responsibility for what happened to him”.
“It’s not much different than the ‘she shouldn’t have worn that dress’ reaction to rape victims,” Keret says. “Claiming that the Israeli is the complete Jew seems very strange and wrong to me. The archetypal Israeli is more an anti-Diaspora Jew than a
complete one. If the Diaspora leaders were intellectuals, the typical Israeli political leader is a general or a farmer, preferably both.
“The Jewish cosmopolitan and self-reflexive critical thought is also hard to find in the archetypical Israeli who is more . . . simple, pragmatic and straight to the point, which doesn’t at all seem to me a continuation or improvement of Jewish thought.”
Laor sees what he terms Yehoshua’s “deformed nationalism” as a reflection of the novelist’s fragile sense of belonging as a Jew of Middle Eastern ancestry. “Since (Yehoshua) is a Sephardic Jew, who never . . had a ‘real belonging’ to the Western fantasy that Zionist Israel lives, he keeps denying the simple fact that our people, like every people in the world, is a collective of many different human beings, colours, faiths, desires, fears, choices. For him, every Jew that remains outside the domain of Israel threatens his own definition of himself as member of a national majority. This is exactly his weakness as a writer: he is
unable to think about people outside their national identity.”
Yehoshua admits that as a developing writer he avoided writing about his Sephardic origins, but says that the accusations that he was effacing his ethnicity are misguided.
As an emerging voice in the Israeli intelligentsia, Yehoshua sought to be defined by his national rather than ethnic identity. Only after establishing his Israeli selfhood did he return to his Sephardic background as grist for his work.
“When the majority of the newcomers were coming from countries, it was easy for them because all their background was left in the Diaspora,” he explains. “My marks of identity were here, so there was a certain effort to detach myself from the ethnic side.”
Yehoshua has been familiar with the milieu of Israeli Orientalists from his childhood. His father was an Arabist who spoke the language fluently and fostered in his son a belief that the Arabs were “part of the family”.
“They were really excellent people who tried not just to understand the politics of the Arabs, but the deep layers of their
conscience. They thought that because we are coming back to this country and we want to live with them forever, we have to understand our neighbours.”
But unlike his son, Yehoshua’s father was not a dove in his political convictions. “Because he’d read their stuff, he was saying to me, ‘never there will be peace with them’. Sometimes I think he was right.”
This background gave Yehoshua the confidence to feel he could dissect the Arab mind just as effortlessly as he would analyse the Jewish psyche. The death of his father in 1982 coincided with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. These twin events
precipitated the crafting of his ambitious city portrait Mr Mani (“my great novel”). Drawing from his father’s 12 published studies on Jerusalem, the novel consisted of five one-sided “conversations”, each narrated by a member of the same family marooned within an epochal moment of Jewish history.
“For the first time I felt I cannot understand my fellow people,” he says. “(It) was as if I discovered a member of my family had gone crazy. This was a kind of psychoanalytic process to go to the past to understand the present.”
He says he would like some day to live in Australia, but only if he could bring all the Jews of the world along with him.
“I would love to have a small Australia to collect all the Jewish people of the world. Then you will see there will be no anti-Semitism. To live among ourselves in our territories, clear within our borders, this is our dream. But you will not offer Australia to us.”
He laughs. “If you could cut a part and surround it by sea, it perhaps could work. But inside Australia we will be immediately in Melbourne and Sydney.”
The Holy Rosenbergs (289.48 kB) 
