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| A Woman in Jerusalem | 
 enlarge | Author: A. B. Yehoshua
Creator: Hillel Halkin
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $3.91
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (20 reviews)
Sales Rank: 59445
Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0156031949
Dewey Decimal Number: 892.436
EAN: 9780156031943
ASIN: 0156031949
Publication Date: August 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery?s owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman?s life take shape?she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful?he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today. (20060601)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 A Modern Classic! June 3, 2008
Yulia Rageyev was a Soviet immigrant to Jersualem, Israel. She was married and divorced mother of a troubled teenage son. Not much is known about her because she was an unidentified victim of a suicide bombing in Jersualem, her adopted hometown. A journalist and a bakery manager are on a mission to learn more about her life despite the lack of information. All they have is a pay stub from the bakery that she works at, they learn that she was an engineer and worked as a cleaning lady during the night shift. She wasn't Jewish. She had a Jewish lover but she had a deep love of Jersualem. The woman was middle-aged at 48 years old at the time of her death. Her body was laid in the morgue for a week before identification. Along the journey, we learn little about the names of the characters including the manager and journalist. We don't know Yulia's survivors which include her mother who lives in a remote village in Russia which takes days to reach by car. When they get there to lay Yulia in her final resting place, her elderly mother is baffled that she is not interred in her adopted hometown of Jerusalem. In the end of the novel, we learn a lot about life in Israel, the politics and red tape surrounding the death of one woman.
 Giving honor, name and background to a faceless victim May 24, 2008
A. B. Yehoshua, one of Israel's master storytellers, gives honor, name and background to the faceless victim of a suicide bomb in Jerusalem. Yehoshua's literary trick - one that he pulls off effortlessly over 200+ pages - is to refer to only the victim, Yulia Ragayev, by name. Everyone else is referred to by role - 'the human resources manager,' 'the secretary,' 'the bread company owner,' etc. Sounds contrived and stilted, but it works very well. Credit here must be shared by translator Hillel Halkin. I imagine it was no small feat to get the same technique down seamlessly in another language.
Ultimately, this is a frustrating work. I don't want to give away the story here, but Yehoshua takes us far afield from Jerusalem, looking to bring closure to Ragayev and her family. The protagonist's conscience intervenes and brings us to an end that is not quite an end, but instead another beginning. This reader was looking for closure, too, so this book's lack of denouement didn't sit well with me.
For a better read - albeit from quite a different perspective - about a similar topic, check out Yasmira Khadra's excellent 2006 work, The Attack.
A Search for Love and Place April 4, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
A. B. Yehoshua's novel, "A Woman in Jerusalem" raises a number of difficult themes -- the nature of love, the search for identity, the importance of place -- but explores them unconvincingly. I don't think the novel succeeds.
The story involves a dead non-Jewish woman, Yulia Ragayev,in her late 40s who had immigrated to Jersualem with her Jewish lover and her son from a former marriage. When her lover and son leave she opts to remain and is killed in an attack by suicide bombers. Although trained as an engineer, Yulia has taken a job as a cleaning woman with a large bakery company, whose parent company also makes newsprint. Upon her death, she is traced to the company, and an opportunistic news reporter, the "weasel" is going to publish an article faulting the company for not showing more compassion towards its employee.
Only Yulia is named in the novel with the other characters identified by their functions, such as the "weasel", the "office manager", and, the chief character "the human resources manager". A theme of the book thus seems to be the anonymity of modern life. The owner of the company, out of a mixture of genuine compassion and self-interest for his business, charges the human resources manager to learn Yulia's story and make appropriate amends on behalf of the company. The human resources manager ultimately travels with Yulia's coffin to an obscure village in Russia in the depth of winter, where he encounters the Israeli counsul, Yulia's ex-husband, her son, and her mother.
The book tells of the outward journey of the human resources manager to secure a proper burial for Yulia and his inward journey to find himself. The human resources manager, in his early 40s, has just been divorced and is living with his mother while he prowls the pubs in the evenings in search of a new relationship. He worries about his teenage daughter. He had interviewed Yulia and given her a job but had no memory of her. In particular, because he was wrapped up in himself and his own troubles, he missed her beauty and her charisma which was apparent to everyone else. But he becomes attracted to her, in her death, in attempting to give her a proper burial, and in the process he tries to understand what he himself wants from life.
There are many threads and evocative moments in the book, but they mostly don't lead anywhere and the story doesn't come together. One of the better moments was a scene near the end of the novel where the human resources manager and the reporter ("weasel") discuss Plato. The two men had been students in philosophy classes at the university. The reporter, for all his cynicism, has been working for years on a dissertation of Plato's Phaedo, a dialogue which discusses the fate of the soul after death. He and the human resources manager have a discussion about Plato's Symposium, and its treatment of human love and its relationship to the eternal. With an ironic wink in his eye, Yehoshua has the weasel say that "Platonic love has been mined to exhaustion." (p. 186). A little later in the conversation, the weasel observes that "that's love's secret. There is no forumla. Each person has to find the secret for himself. That's why Eros is neither god nor man.... yet he links the human to the divine, the temporal to the eternal." (pp 187-188) The theme of the soul's immortality in Plato's Phaedo and of the nature of love and eros in the Symposium capture many of the themes of this novel.
Yehoshua's book reminded me of Jose Saramago's novel "All the Names", in which all the primary characters except for the main character, are, likewise, nameless. In Saramago's book, a lonely and alienated clerk in the General Registry becomes obsessed with and searches for a beautiful woman who has died. Saramago's and Yehosua's books use many of the same devices and, in their pictures of anonymity and loneliness, emphasize the need in human life for connectedness and love. Readers interested in the themes Yehoshua treats may enjoy Saramago's fine novel.
Robin Friedman
The Bookschlepper definitely recommends February 27, 2008
: "Masterpiece" is an over-worked word but it can justly be applied to this novel. The psyche of modern Israelis, the realities of everyday life under siege and the emotional quandaries of middle age are explored subtly; the plot is full of twists and turns (like daily life) and supports the emotional context well. Characters emerge from the pages as real people. Through it all moves the spirit of Yulia Ragayev, the engineer-cum-cleaning woman whose beauty creates "a bookkeeping error," whose violent death sets the novel in motion, and whose body becomes a lodestar.
I also read The Reluctant Bride which I enjoyed for its in-depth look at a novelized Israeli-Arab relationship but that book pales by comparison with this one.
The Resouce Manager's Mission December 5, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This work might best be called a tale because the text takes the form of a simple recounting of events that more or less move forward without undue skipping around. Thus, the novel is very easy to read and even becomes a page-turner. Third person italicized commentaries, scattered throughout the work reminiscent of a Greek chorus, add a poetic elaboration. It would be quite interesting to compare this translation to the original.
The story is simple. Yulia Ragayev, a foreigner living in Jerusalem, is killed by a terrorist attack, and can only be identified through a pay stub, found on her body, as a nameless employee of a large bakery firm. Abandoned while fighting for her life in a hospital, she then lays unidentified in the hospital morgue for many days until a story headlined "The Shocking Inhumanity Behind Our Daily Bread" appears in a newspaper. The distraught old jewish owner of the large firm, berated by an eager journalist, charges his human resource manager with identifying and burying their dead employee.
With the exception of the unidentified dead woman, all the characters in the novel have tags rather than names--the resource manager, the old man, the weasel journalist, etc. This anonyminity extends to character descriptions as well. The reader learns only a little about any one of the characters including Yulia Ragayev. Although the author uses an Israeli example, the novel seems to address the horror and inhumanity of any nameless and forgotten terrorist victim in this age when in some parts of the world death by terrorism has become an ordinary way to die.
Another important issue that the author addresses is the question of who should live in Jerusalem. The author's answer to the question controls the ending of the work. This is not a question to be governed by politics or bureaucracy but by a deep regard for humanity. Yehoshua tells his tale beautifuly and with subtlety, but somehow the end seems to lack the intricacy of the rest of the story.
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