A.B. Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem in 1936 into a fifth-generation Sephardi family. His fiction engages Jewish life in Israel and beyond through characters, family histories, and narrative experiments; it should not be reduced to a single thesis about Sephardic identity or exile. The Institute biography documents his Jerusalem background and career.
Yehoshua’s Israeli and Diaspora Settings
The Institute biography records that Yehoshua studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lived and taught in Paris from 1963 to 1967, and later taught at the University of Haifa. His essays addressed the relationship between Israeli life and diaspora, but his novels give that argument different forms and voices.
The Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature lists his essay collection Between Right and Left and identifies his novels and short fiction as distinct parts of his career. Treating his stated views as a key to every character would flatten the books: fictional people can disagree with, complicate, or exceed an author’s arguments.
Five voices in The Lover
The Lover (Ha-Me’ahev, 1977) is organized through six sections and five principal speaking characters: Adam, his wife Asya, their daughter Dafi, Asya’s lover Gabriel, and Naim, a young Arab employee in Adam’s garage. The changing narrators give the same family crisis different meanings. The Institute’s bibliography records the novel and its translations. The book’s design makes perspective itself part of the subject: readers piece together events from voices with unequal knowledge and competing desires.
The novel’s historical setting is the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but its central action remains the relationships among these characters. Its formal choices let national events enter domestic life without turning the book into a single public speech.
Mr. Mani and family memory
Mr. Mani (Hebrew publication 1990; English edition 1992) moves backward through five conversations spanning generations, from the twentieth century to the nineteenth. In each section, the reader hears one side of a dialogue and must infer the other. The National Library of Israel describes the novel as five conversations reconstructing six generations of the Mani family, from their emigration from Greece in 1848 to the mid-1980s; see its catalog record for Mr. Mani. This structure makes family history partial by design: each speaker carries a limited account, not a complete record.
Yehoshua’s Sephardi heritage is one relevant context for these books, alongside their broader questions about migration, family, language, and national belonging. His work received the Israel Prize for Literature in 1995, and Mr. Mani was among the works recognized in his international reception. See also the wider history of modern Hebrew fiction.