Eight Candles

FRIENDLY FIRE

A Duet

By A.B. Yehoshua

Translated from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman

Harcourt. 386 pp. $26

It is Hanukkah in Israel, eight nights of celebration to honor the Maccabees, heroes who in ancient times overcame an enemy occupier and reestablished the unity and faith of the people. Candles are lit in public squares as well as in private homes, there are prayers and songs, kids fight for the privilege of lighting the next candle, the nation rejoices. Or does it?

The week of Hanukkah provides the time frame of A.B. Yehoshua's sensitive and thoughtful novel, which deals simultaneously with family life in Israel on a realistic and even comic level, with national anxieties and also with questions regarding the source and purpose of the human community. The settings are Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on the one hand and East Africa on the other, the two backgrounds alternating every few pages, a device that keeps the reader in constant transition from a developed country to a landscape that still tantalizes with the mystery of human origins. And yet Israel and Africa have in common the long shadow of recent and ongoing wars.

The protagonists are a Jewish couple in their 50s, Daniela and Amotz Ya'ari, surrounded by their children and grandchildren, an ailing grandfather and his caretakers, and a complement of Amotz's business associates. In spite of unruly youngsters, hints of infidelity and occasional neighborly animosities, a spirit of kindness and cooperation permeates the various relationships. Yet the normality of their lives is overshadowed by Israel's precarious situation. The title refers to a trauma the family sustained when the son of Daniela's sister was accidentally killed by his own comrades on a mission in the Occupied Territories. The exact circumstances of his death pose a puzzle that runs through the novel and is solved bit by bit, leading ultimately to some unforgettable, disturbing encounters between Jews and Arabs.

Daniela has gone to East Africa to spend Hanukkah with her lonely brother-in-law Yirmiyahu (Yirmi, for short) to mourn with him the loss of his wife, Daniela's beloved older sister, who died not long after friendly fire killed her son. Yirmi has become bitter and angry. He tells his sister-in-law that he will never return to his native country but will remain where and what he is, the administrator of a small archaeological dig that employs only native (that is, black) scientists.

This last point is of some significance because of the book's concern with ethnic groupings in peace and war. Yirmi knows his Bible well and inveighs against the cruelty of his namesake, the Prophet Jeremiah, but he is himself a kind of prophet railing in the wilderness against the burden of Jewish culture. "Here," he says, "there are no ancient graves and no floor tiles from a destroyed synagogue; no museum with a fragment of a burnt Torah; no testimonies about pogroms and the Holocaust. There's no exile here, no Diaspora." Daniela has brought him Hebrew newspapers and Hanukkah candles, which she expected to light with him. Instead, he rudely burns the whole package in his woodstove and enjoins her not to leave any Hebrew writing in his house.

The object of the African archaeologists is to find the missing link between apes and the first humans. At the end of her stay they ask Daniela to smuggle some bones to a scientific institute in Israel, thus making her the messenger between the two cultures and continents, between origin and tradition. In Africa, Daniela learns to respect the religion of animism, the worship of spirits in plants, animals and natural objects. Back in Tel Aviv, Amotz, an engineer, has to deal with outraged tenants in a high-rise, where the winds cause a weird uproar in elevators that his firm has installed. The word for spirits and winds is the same in Hebrew, and these scenes form a semi-comic counterweight to the mysteries of the African jungle. The symbol of the elevator is spun out further when the failure of an ancient and very private lift leads to the reunion of Amotz's father, who uses a wheelchair, and an old flame of his, reviving a personal past in the midst of the larger historical Hanukkah celebration. In this way, private goodness and familial peace stand in juxtaposition to global mayhem and the cruelty or indifference caused by poverty and despair.

The lighting of the last candle on the eighth day of Hanukkah conveys a sense of tentative closure and implicit hope, which the rest of the book doesn't necessarily support. Nonetheless, this is a haunting book about mankind's unity in diversity that will resonate for a long time in the minds of its readers.

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