Laura's Review - A Woman in Jerusalem

A Woman in Jerusalem
A. B. Yehoshua
236 pages

First sentence: Even though the manager of the human resources division had not sought such a mission, now, in the softly radiant morning, he grasped its unexpected significance.

Reflections: An anonymous woman is killed in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, and her body lies unidentified and unclaimed. A recent pay stub is found among her belongings, and a news weekly publishes an article, calling the company uncaring and negligent. The elderly owner calls on his human resources manager to uncover the truth and salvage the company's reputation.

The human resources manager, recently divorced, is dealing with problems of his own. But he has no choice. Researching personnel records, he discovers the woman was an immigrant from one of the countries in the former Soviet Union, and had come to the city for religious reasons. Although trained as an engineer, she was employed as a cleaning woman on the night shift. She was recently let go, but an apparent clerical error resulted in her continuing to receive wages. The human resources manager meets with her supervisor, learns some interesting details, and finds himself personally committed to locating the woman's family and making arrangements for burial. This becomes a journey of atonement and, while it was initially intended simply to clear the company's name, the human resources manager begins to view it as a personal quest, even though he did not know the woman personally.

Yehoshua's prose is terse and understated. The characters do not have names. Yet I found myself caught up in the story, sympathizing with the human resources manager, and mourning with the woman's family. I couldn't put this down and finished it in an afternoon. ( )

My original review can be found here.

A Woman in Jerusalem - A.B. Yehoshua

Title: A Woman in Jerusalem
Author: A.B. Yehoshua; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin
Country: Israel
Year: 2004
Rating: A
Pages: 237 pgs.

First sentence: Even though the manager of the human resources division had not sought such a mission, now, in the softly radiant morning, he grasped its unexpected significance.

There was a lot of hope for the future of the Middle East when the Oslo accords were first signed. However, as many of you probably know, with both sides disappointed in the implementation of the accords, the fall of the Oslo peace process in September 2000 was marked by the start of the second Intifada, the second wave of violence between Palestinians and Israelis since 1967. The violence did not begin to abate until the death of Yasser Arafat at the end of 2004, and the relative success of the Sharm el-Sheikh peace summit in February 2005. Marked by Palestinian suicide bombings in Jerusalem and other cities, and Israeli military excursions into West Bank, Gaza, and other Palestinian settlements, more than 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed in a seven year period.

A Woman in Jerusalem, a novel by A.B. Yehoshua, takes place in Jerusalem around 2002. An immigrant woman is killed by a suicide bombing at her local market. Her body lies unidentified for a week, the only clue to her identity a bloody pay stub from a local bakery. After a tabloid newspaper article is written about the bakery's callousness towards her death, the human resource manager is sent on a mission to identify the woman and return her body to her family.

The only character that receives a name in the story Yulia Ragayev, the cleaning woman from the bakery who was killed. All other characacters are referred to by their positions: human resources manager, owner, office manager, consul, ex-husband, young son. It is a technique that works extremely well for the style of the novel. I especially liked the italicized inserts of the thoughts of random bystanders to the story line: the bakery's shift workers, Yulia's neighbor's, her mother's fellow villagers.

The story line certainly sounds dreary and depressing, but it is ultimately a story of hope and humor. The final scenes may not appeal to many readers, but I felt they were perfectly appropriate to the characters Yehoshua created. This is the first of his novels I have read, it will certainly not be the last.