From the Publisher

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.

The New York Times - Claire Messud

Embedded in this simple story are fundamental questions about identity, selfhood, belonging. Yehoshua, long a master of gentle, almost Chekhovian comedy, takes in this instance a deeply bleak premise — Yulia Ragayev’s brutal death — and creates from it a work of art by turns absurd, strange and moving.

The Washington Post - Warren Bass

The result is a small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion. "I'd like a yes or no answer: are we guilty or not?" the bakery owner asks at one point. "Responsible is more like it," the human resource manager replies. "Responsible for what?" the old man wants to know. "I'll tell you later," replies the emissary.

Publishers Weekly

Israel's master novelist (Mr. Mani) tells a spellbinding tale about a spellbinding woman whose luminous smile, swan's neck and Tatar eyes are so beguiling that even in death she can lead a man to fall in love with her. The woman is Yulia Ragayev, a Slavic immigrant to Israel who has been killed in a terrorist bombing and whose corpse lies unidentified in a morgue for a week. The man (who, like everyone in the novel except Yulia, remains nameless) is the human resources manager at the commercial bakery where Yulia worked as a cleaning woman. A muckraking article forces the bakery's owner to discover her identity and take action to restore her dignity. The owner orders the HR director to return Yulia's body to her son and mother in her native land for burial-a journey that turns into an opportunity for moral redemption for him after a series of stunning reversals. Throughout, Yulia remains a mystery: why did she come to, and cling to, Jerusalem when she wasn't Jewish? Questions of morality, dignity, identity, nationality and belonging are subtly explored in sometimes hallucinatory prose, fluently translated by Halkin. This short novel's layers reveal themselves only gradually and, once revealed, continue to compel and provoke. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Miami Herald

"An elegantly structured, thoroughly accessible story, albeit one with rich philosophical layers...A WOMAN moves us with deep insights into the meaning of home, belonging and the fate of the stranger."

Library Journal

"[T]he writing is beautifully exact and the moral issues delivered with an understated authority."

—Barbara Hoffert

Kirkus Reviews

"A moving, unsentimental reckoning with death and renewal."

The Economist

"What engages Mr. Yehoshua most here is the question of humanity...Yet his evocation of what it means to be human is drawn in the subtlest strokes...A sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart--for other people as well as his own."

New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of the Year."

Publishers Weekly

Publisher's Weekly "Best Books of the Year" list.

Harper's Magazine

"[An] astonishing new novel...Like sacred music, the deepest chords resound."

Washington Post Book World

"A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM is a book about a mission and a memorial...But while the novel is always aware of the sorrows of modern Israel, it soars on wry, wise wings far above the battered landscape...The result is a small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion."

The Jewish Week

"Compelling reading...[A Woman in Jerusalem] is a realistic tale of everyday life in Israel, gracefully told, that sometimes has a mythic quality; at other times it is playful."

BOOKFORUM

"This mysterious, quiet meditation on Jerusalem is, I think, about something much greater [than Israel's "problems and identity."] The manager . . . trying to make some meaning of . . . pointless, violent death, as all the structures of his own life fall apart around him, is a figure much bigger and much sadder than even the horrific reality of Israel can suggest." —Neil Gordon

Curled Up With A Good Book.com

"The author beautifully renders a humanity that transcends culture and ritual, the distinctly personal engagement of a lonely man and the woman in his care, no obstacle too great in a quest for the fulfillment of a promise."

Chrstian Science Monitor

"Yehoshua is examining a deeper question: what does it mean to be human--humane--especially during troubled times? ''When Jerusalem is burning, does any of this matter?'' The answer for both the author and his main character seems to be: ''more than ever.''"

Library Journal

He doesn't know it, but the manager of the human resources division of a bakery in Jerusalem is about to launch on a journey. A woman killed in a terrorist bombing has been traced to the bakery by a pay stub, and a nasty newspaper story condemns the owner's insensitivity in letting her languish nameless in the morgue. In fact, she's not currently an employee, but it's up to the manager to fix this public relations disaster, an assignment that leads him from the victim's shabby home all the way to Russia to deliver her body to her mother and son. While surmounting bureaucratic hurdles, the manager wrestles with issues of doing good. He's also painfully reminded of his strained relationships with his daughter and ex-wife. As might be expected from noteworthy Israeli author Yehoshua (The Liberated Bride), the writing is beautifully exact and the moral issues delivered with understated authority. Yet the protagonist's circumscribed nature and grinding battles to accomplish his goal can lend the narrative an airless and boxed-in feel. Nevertheless, any novel by Yehoshua should be strongly considered by literary and international fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/06.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Israeli novelist Yehoshua (The Liberated Bride, 2003, etc.) explores our obligations to the dead in an emotionally powerful novel. The central event-the death of a young woman-happens before the story opens, but informs all of what will come for the main character, an unnamed human-resources manager. Yulia Ragayev, a cleaning woman for a bakery in Jerusalem, is killed in a suicide bombing, and when no one claims her body, a fiery newspaper reporter denounces the woman's employer. Unwilling to be cast as a heartless businessman, the bakery's kindly owner gives the company's HR guy the task of finding Yulia's family. After a moving tour of the places where Yulia's marginal life unfolded, the man, heart-stricken that this beautiful woman was, in fact, a lonely illegal immigrant, begins to feel a connection with her. Accompanied by the opportunistic reporter, he brings Yulia's body to the impoverished Eastern European country she left in search of a better life. The journey is curiously liberating for the man, who-divorced, estranged from his own daughter, careless about making human connections-sees in Yulia a wasted life with redemptive possibilities. The story ends with an unexpected plot twist that dovetails perfectly with Yehoshua's subtle ruminations on what constitutes family and home. The narrative strategy of naming the dead woman while referring to everyone else by their job titles is, like the emotional restraint of Yehoshua's writing, characteristic of his political bluntness and more subdued hopefulness. A moving, unsentimental reckoning with death and renewal.

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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. The minute the extraordinary request of the old woman who stood in her monk's robe by the dying fire was translated and explained to him, he felt a sudden lifting of his spirits, and Jerusalem, the shabby, suffering city he had left just a week ago, was once more bathed in a glow of importance, as it had been in his childhood.
 
AND YET the origins of his unusual mission lay in a simple clerical error brought to the company’s attention by the editor of a local Jerusalem weekly, an error that could have been dealt with by any reasonable excuse and brief apology. However, fearing that such an apology— which might indeed have laid the matter to rest— would be deemed inadequate, the stubborn eighty-seven-year-old owner of the company had demanded a more tangible expression of regret from himself and his staff, a clearly defined gesture such as the one that had resulted in this journey to a distant land.
 
What had upset the old man so? Where had the almost religious impulse that drove him come from? Could it have been inspired by the grim times that the country, and above all Jerusalem, were going through, which he had weathered unharmed; so that his financial success, as other businesses foundered, called for vigilance in warding off the public criticism that now, ironically, was about to be aired in newsprint of which he himself was the supplier? Not that the reporter whose scathing feature article would break the story— a political radical and eternal doctoral candidate withthe restraint of a bull in this intimate china shop of a city— was aware of all this when he wrote the piece, or he would have toned it down. Yet it was the paper’s editor and publisher, loath to ruin a colleague’s weekend with an unpleasant surprise that might spoil their business relations, who had decided, after taking a look at the story and its accompanying photograph of the torn, bloodstained pay stub found in the murdered woman’s shopping bag, to let the old man respond in the same issue.
 Nor was it really such a shocking exposé. Nevertheless, at a time when pedestrians were routinely exploding in the streets, troubled consciences turned up in the oddest places. And so at the end of that particular workday, when the human resources manager, having promised his ex-wife that he would leave the office on time to be with their only daughter, had tried to evade the owner’s summons, the old man’s veteran office manager had refused to let him. Sensing her boss’s agitation, she’d hastened to advise the resource manager to put his family duties aside.
 
ON THE WHOLE, relations between the two men were good. They had been so ever since the resource manager, then in the sales division, had unearthed several Third World markets for the company’s new line of paper and stationery products. And so, when his manager’s marriage was on the rocks, in part because of his frequent travels, the old man had reluctantly agreed to appoint him temporary head of the human resources division, a job that would allow him to sleep at home every night and try to repair the damage. Yet the hostility engendered by his absence was only distilled into a more concentrated poison by his presence, and the chasm between them— at first psychological, then intellectual, and finally sexual— continued to grow of its own accord. Now that he was divorced, all that kept him from returning to his old job, which he had liked, was his determination to stay close to his daughter.
 As soon as he’d appeared in the doorway of the owner’s spacious office, where the elegantly muted light never changed with the time of day or year, the article due to appear in the local weekly was dramatically hurled at him.
 
“An employee of ours?” The resource manager found that hard to credit. “Impossible. I would have known about it. There must be some mistake.”
 The owner did not answer. He simply held out the galleys, which the resource manager read quickly while still standing. The odious article was entitled “The Shocking Inhumanity Behind Our Daily Bread.” Its subject was a forty-year-old woman found critically wounded after a bombing in the Jerusalem market the week before. Her only identifying mark had been a pay stub issued by the company. For two days she had fought for her life in the hospital without any of her employers or fellow workers taking the slightest interest in her. Even after her death, she had lain in the hospital morgue abandoned and unidentified, her fate unmourned and her burial unprovided for. (There followed a brief description of the company and its large, well-known bakery, founded at the beginning of the last century by the owner’s grandfather and recently augmented by the new line of paper products.) Two photographs accompanied the text. One, taken years ago, was an old studio portrait of the owner; the other was of the human resources manager. It was dark and blurry, evidently snapped recently, without his knowledge. The caption noted that he owed his position to his divorce.
 
© 2004 Abraham B. Yehoshua
English translation © 2006 by Hillel Halkin
 
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A Woman in Jerusalem

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