Mary Whipple has written an in depth review of The Retrospective by A.B. Yehoshua which has featured on her excellent book review website Seeing the World Through Books:
'In this age of sound bites and tweets, few novelists devote hundreds of pages to the creation of thoughtful and insightful novels of ideas concerned with major philosophical and moral issues. Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua is just such an author, however, creating a surprising novel which ranges widely, as it examines such issues as reality vs. the recreation of reality through art and film and myth; life, as opposed to the afterlife, and whether the afterlife is real or imagined; the actualities of the past vs. memories of the past; the concept of guilt and whether one can atone; and the many aspects of love – love and death, love and hatred, love and jealousy – as it controls our actions (and even our politics).'
An excellent review of The Retrospective published in The Independent by Donald Macintyre:
"Halfway through A.B. Yehoshua's novel, Yair Moses, an ageing but distinguished Israeli film director who is in Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his early work, decides ,on a whim, to ask a friendly Dominican monk if he can make his confession in the city's cathedral. Everything about the confession is strange. It is made in Moses's native Hebrew which the scholarly monk, Manuel, knows well. And the director tells him that: "I don't need absolution that does not follow an act of atonement – which no one can perform in my place."
This remark, incidentally juxtaposing Jewish against Christian doctrine, goes to the core of Moses's predicament. Accompanying him is Ruth, long his leading actress, with whom he has an ambiguous relationship. In their shared hotel room hangs a reproduction of a 17th-century painting, Caritas Romana, depicting an old man suckling at the proffered breast of a young woman. Which is odd, because during the shooting of one of Moses's films years ago, Ruth's refusal to take part in an almost identical scene, and Moses's acceptance of her refusal, had enraged the film's screenwriter Trigano, Moses's collaborator and Ruth's lover. Feeling his artistic integrity violated, Trigano ended relations with both.
Moses is preoccupied by this unfinished business and thinks that confessing it all before he returns home "might restore his soul". Once back, he seeks out the deeply hostile Trigano, because he wants him to persuade Ruth, who may be seriously ill, to take blood tests. Trigano demands in return from Moses an exacting act of, yes, atonement, which provides The Retrospective's satisfying denouement.
In a translator's note, Stuart Schoffman explains the double meaning of the book's Hebrew title, Hesed Sefaradi. "Hesed" denotes "compassion, kindness, love and charity" while "Sefaradi" means "Spanish", as well as referring to the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, and "more broadly", those from Arab countries. Moses, a Jew visiting the land of the Inquisition, brings Ruth, a child of Israeli immigrants from North Africa. "Sephardic", in all its meanings, haunts the book. But it is also a compelling meditation on art, memory, love, guilt. A hugely pleasurable read, it shows that in his seventies, A.B. Yehoshua is still producing some of his best work.
The BBC have recently conducted an interview with A.B. Yehoshua about his new novel The Retrospective that you can watch at the link below.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qzcmg/HARDtalk_AB_Yehoshua_Author/
Don’t forget that you can purchase ‘The Retrospective’ on the Halban Publishers website: http://www.halbanpublishers.com/showBook.php?file=retrospective.xml&sortby=date.
For more updates on A B Yehoshua and ‘The Retrospective’, like Halban Publishers on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @HalbanPublisher.
Charlotte - Halban Publish
The Guardian have uploaded a podcast featuring a discussion with A.B. Yehoshua, Judith Butler and Sam Leith about Yehoshua as a writer and also about his decision to make the protagonist of The Retrospective a film-maker rather than a writer.
You can listen to the podcast here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/audio/2013/mar/01/sounds-jewish-podcast-book-week
Don't forget that you can purchase The Retrospective on the Halban Publishers website http://www.halbanpublishers.com/showBook.php?file=retrospective.xml&sortby=date.
For more updates on A.B. Yehoshua and The Retrospective, like Halban Publishers on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @HalbanPublisher.
The Jewish Chronicle's review of A. B. Yehoshua and 'The Retrospective'
David Herman from The Jewish Chronicle online has written an intellectually stimulating review reflecting on his interview with A B Yehoshua at London's Jewish Book Week, and also about 'The Retrospective' and Yehoshua's works in general.
Herman analyses Yehoshua's role as the voice of Israel and comments how 'It is hard to imagine a writer more rooted in his homeland'. Herman also examines Yehoshua's influences, his biography and his own Jewish identity.
You can purchase 'The Retrospective' on the Halban Publishers website here:http://www.halbanpublishers.com/showBook.php?file=retrospective.xml&sortby=date.
For more updates on Yehoshua and 'The Retrospective' like us on Facebook or follow us @HalbanPublisher.
Charlotte - Halban Publishers
A B Yehoshua — the writer still shaping Israel’s identity
Part of the pioneering post-1948 generation, the veteran author remains an important influence among Israelis
ByDavid Herman, February 28, 2013
Follow The JC on Twitter
A B Yehoshua has been one of Israel’s leading writers for more than half a century, since he and Amoz Oz and Aharon Appelfeld met as young students in Jerusalem in the 1950s. His recent novels have a wonderful restraint, an increasingly elegiac feel. But in person, Yehoshua is full of energy and passion, the words pour forth in fluent English.
He was born in Jerusalem in 1936, to a fifth generation Israeli family. “That is very important for me,” he says, banging the table in the room in the London hotel where we meet. My tape recorder bounces up and down. Why is it important?
“Because it was before Zionism.”
His father’s family came from Salonica in the mid-19th century. “Not because of pogrom, not because of antisemitism. Because of next year in Jerusalem,” he says.
His mother was Moroccan. She came with her father in 1932. He died four years later, the year his grandson, Abraham, was born. “In my DNA, the Zionist gene is extremely strong,” Yehoshua says.
Unlike most of the great Israeli writers, Yehoshua is Sephardi. The others were Ashkenazi. Shmuel Agnon, a huge influence, born in Galicia; Benjamin Tammuz, Russian; Yehuda Amichai, German; Appelfeld, from Bukovina. Oz’s parents are from eastern Europe.
Yehoshua comes from a very different world. His roots are in the Mediterranean. It is surely no coincidence that he lived in Haifa for almost 50 years. He has only just moved to Tel Aviv, to be close to his children and grandchildren.
Was that difficult for him growing up in Israel as a Sephardi Jew? Did he feel like an outsider?
What mattered, he says, was the Israeli context, not an ethnic context, though he concedes that his Sephardi roots gave him “another point of view. I think about the Arabs not as enemies but as cousins. Even when we are in a fierce conflict with them they are more of a kind of family — with all the problems of a family. We have to live with them.”
He orders an espresso. It comes with biscuits. My tape recorder stops bouncing on the table. Then he is off again.
Crucially, Yehoshua was part of the generation that grew up after independence. Generation is a key word for him. He comes back to it again and again. “I believe in generations,” he says.
In a fascinating piece he wrote some years ago, he said he was part of the “generation of the State”. This generation was important in helping “consolidate and mould the Israeli identity”. They were very different from the previous generation, “the generation of the War of Independence”.
“The nucleus of their experience was the creation of the state: from the land of Israel to the state of Israel,” he says.
His generation — Appelfeld, Oz, the poet Moshe Dor — were all born in the 1930s and grew up after independence, emerging as writers in the late 1950s. He adds others to the group — Amichai and even David Grossman. But isn’t Grossman much younger?
“Grossman’s like a schoolboy who skipped a year,” he laughs.
“We are the generation,” Yehoshua wrote, “which internalised very clearly the transition from eretz Israel to Israel, and this had great significance, since through this we acquired a grasp of frontiers and the security that comes from understanding frontiers.”
But there was something else. Many of these writers studied Hebrew literature at the University of Jerusalem. “The sense of continuity and commitment to Hebrew literature of our generation has permitted a more integrated attitude to the Jewish past,” he says.
There was an international context too. “World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical. To deal with this demonic reality, writers like Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre, Camus, turned to the absurd, the symbolic. And we, in Israel, we did too — for Israeli reasons and for world reasons.”
This was when Kafka was discovered. Kafka is hugely important for Yehoshua and he comes up a number of times in his new novel, The Retrospective, the story of an Israeli film director, in his seventies, who comes to terms with his past.
Which other writers influenced him? He mentions Beckett, Agnon and particularly Faulkner. “Faulkner’s a giant, combining history, drama, specific attachment to a particular place.”
Yehoshua and his wife, a psychoanalyst, spent some years in Paris in the ’60s. It was important, he says, not that they went to France but that they did not go to America. “Israel is too attached to America, too influenced by America. It should be connected to Europe.”
He pauses. “America is based on mythology — the free man, the individual, the open frontier. Europe is more conscious of history. Take Britain and Shakespeare. You shape your identity through history.”
He had a run-in with American Jews a few years ago when he gave a speech saying that Israeli Jews are more authentically Jewish than Jews in the diaspora. This did not go down well. He is more conciliatory now.
“My Jewish identity,” he says, “is total. Your Jewish identity — in America, in Britain — is partial. I pay taxes to the Jews, I go to war for the Jews. All my decisions are Jewish. It’s not a question of who’s a good or a bad Jew.”
It is hard to imagine a writer more rooted in his homeland. And yet, curiously, The Retrospective starts at a film festival in Spain and another recent novel, Friendly Fire, moves between east Africa and Israel. Why this movement between Israel and abroad?
“Moving from one place to another is important to the tradition of Jewish literature. There is this capacity to have a different angle, a different place.”
It is the second time he has mentioned having “a different angle”, first as a Sephardi Jew, then as a Jewish writer. No one could be more passionately Jewish or Israeli. But no one is less provincial or insular.
Yehoshua has just come from Paris where his new novel has won two prestigious awards. He is in London to speak at Jewish Book Week. In his seventies, he is as busy as ever, much in demand.
His Book Week event is due to begin shortly after our interview, but there is time for one last question. How would you like to be remembered?
“As an honest writer,” he says.
The Retrospective is published by Halban Publishers at £9.99
The original article can be found here: http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/102912/a-b-yehoshua-%E2%80%94-writer-still-shaping-israel%E2%80%99s-identity
Sandee Brawarsky, a Jewish Book Week critic, has given a great review of A B Yehoshua's 'The Retrospective' that is definitely worth reading.
Brawarsky utilises Yehoshua's responses from interviews as well as further biographical information to contextualise the novel in relation to the author's life, beliefs and other literary accomplishments. She also explores how "the richly plotted 'The Retrospective' hinges on ideas about artistic integrity and moral commitment".
'The Retrospective' can be purchased here on the Halban Publishers's website: http://www.halbanpublishers.com/showBook.php?file=retrospective.xml&sortby=date.
You can also follow us on Twitter @HalbanPublisher and use the hash tags #TheRetrospective and #ABYehoshua to let us know your own opinions of the novel.
You can also like Halban Publishers on Facebook for more Yehoshua updates.
Charlotte - Halban Publishers
Yehoshua Takes On The Artist
His richly plotted ‘The Retrospective’ hinges on ideas about artistic integrity and moral commitment.
Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic
Givatayim, Israel –‘The Retrospective” is a work of art inspired by another work of art, a novel with roots in a painting.
A few years ago, A. B. Yehoshua and his wife were visiting Santiago de Compostelo, Spain, and he saw a graying reproduction of a disturbing painting, with a prisoner feeding at the breast of young woman. He took a photo of the painting, something he rarely does, and then showed it to an expert. The painting is “Caritas Romana” or “Roman Charity,” based on an ancient Roman legend of Cimon, imprisoned and sentenced to die by starvation, and his daughter Pero. That scene has been portrayed in paintings, sculpture and drawings over the centuries, including works by Caravaggio, Rubens and Vermeer.
“My readers are eager to see some element of autobiography. If I take something from my life, I cut it into very small pieces,” he says, chopping up an imaginary block with his hand. He adds, “I am trying to understand myself through the writing.”
“The Retrospective” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), beautifully translated into English by Stuart Schoffman, was published in Hebrew as “Hesed Sefaradi.” A translator’s note explains that chesed “eludes precise translation” and connotes kindness, compassion and charity, and that Sefaradi refers both to Jews whose ancestors were expelled from Spain and to Jews from Arabic-speaking countries. Schoffman’s aside that “the double meaning helps the reader get the picture” hints at the many levels of meaning the reader is about to encounter in the richly plotted story.
Last year, Yehoshua, whose previous works include “The Lover,” “A Late Divorce,” “Mr. Mani” and “A Journey to the End of the Millennium,” was awarded the prestigious French “Prix Medicis” for the new novel. The Hebrew edition features the painting on the cover, although the American version does not.
A talk with the 76-year-old author about the novel becomes a wide-ranging conversation about art and Judaism, the nature of creativity, Israeli policies and politics, God, religion and peacemaking, all springing from the storyline. He’s open and generous and articulate.
Before meeting Yehoshua, I ask cab drivers, cousins, hotel clerks and other Hebrew speakers about him, and many have read him, some back in their school days. He’s part of the modern Hebrew canon, and is recognized by the café waiters, who seem pleased by his presence, although they make no fuss.
The Aleph (A) in his pen name is for Avraham, Bet (B) is for Buli, a nickname given to him by childhood friends. The winner of the Israel Prize, he grew up in Jerusalem, the son of a fifth-generation Jerusalem family originally from Salonika on his father’s side, and a Moroccan-born mother. His grandfather was a rabbi, and the family’s lifestyle was traditional. He served in the Israeli Army, studied literature and philosophy at Hebrew University and, until recently, taught at the University of Haifa. His books have been widely translated and published in more than 25 countries, with many adapted to film, theater and opera.
When asked about the emotional complexity that marks the characters in his novels, he says, “In this I got good training. I am married to a psychoanalyst — I have to understand that the world is not simple. You see the surface and have to dig again and again.”
In “Retrospective,” film director Yair Moses travels to Santiago, a pilgrimage city with grand plazas and cathedrals, at the invitation of the city’s Archive of Cinematic Arts, for a major retrospective of his early films. He later learns that the film institute is connected to the Catholic Church, and that its director is an ordained priest. His companion is Ruth, his longtime leading actress, who is also aging, and they are fine-tuned to each others’ needs. Moses is still full of ideas for new films; he sees images and tries to commit them to memory to recreate in the future.
Watching his old and ambitious avant-garde films, he doesn’t always remember the scenes. But they spark memories of earlier days and his late cinematographer Toledano and now-estranged screenwriter Trigano, and the surreal, absurdist visions they tried to express. The retrospective is full of surprises.
In their hotel room, he is struck by a painting and later finds out that it is “Roman Charity.” The painting reminds him of the dispute that ended his collaboration with his longtime screenwriter, who worked on these early films and had been Ruth’s lover. Returning to Israel, Moses seeks him out, with hopes of reconciliation and a different kind of collaboration. The screenwriter presents him a challenge, and the conclusion of the novel is daring, with a mix of Cervantes and “Don Quixote,” considered the first modern novel.
“For me, coming to ‘Don Quixote,’ this is my retrospective — going back to sources of the imagination,” Yehoshua says.
The descriptions of the films suggest some of Yehoshua’s earlier short stories, and he admits that two of them are directly based on “The Yatir Evening Express” and “The Last Commander,” while the others are imagined. If the novel might seem like a retrospective of Yehoshua’s own career and the shifts he has made, he’d rather talk about his own interest in the creative process.
He’s a writer who takes seriously the professions of his heroes, whether they are engineers, lawyers or garage owners. This is the first time he’s written about an artist. Here, he creates relationships between the director, cinematographer and screenwriter that show the dynamics between wild imagination, ideas and aesthetics. As a novelist, he performs all of these functions, directing, creating images and developing the storyline.
In fact, the dispute between the Ashkenazi director and Sephardi screenwriter is about art — the screenwriter sees a failure of imagination in the director. For the screenwriter, there are no boundaries in art, and no humiliation; art and meaning, even beauty, can be drawn even from the most terrible of sources. Theirs is really a conflict between artistic integrity and moral commitment, one of the book’s underlying themes.
Yehoshua believes that art has no borders. But, he says that creating art is “not for the sake of breaking borders, but to reach new understandings of life.”
The rift between the two men also reflects Israel’s societal break, between Jews of European background and those from Sephardic, or Oriental backgrounds, between religious and secular.
“My feeling is that without cooperation between these two elements, the identity of Israel is in trouble. We need not just an attempt at cooperation, but,” he says, weaving his fingers together in the air, “a mutual feeling of each other.
“I am a believer in reconciliation with the Arabs, with factions in society; I am eager to contribute to reconciliation,” says Yehoshua, who is known for his alignment with Israel’s left. “I believe in the concept of man’s ability to change.” He speaks of Zionism as a movement of optimism, based in the tenet that the future can be different from the past.
The conversation shifts to the recent elections and peacemaking with the Palestinians, which is highest on his national priorities. “I am optimistic,” he says, and looks forward to President Obama’s planned visit later this month. Some on the left, he says, look toward Obama as messiah, but he warns that Obama can’t do the job for the Israelis.
“In Israel, you have to be educated in democracy — it’s in the genes of Americans. You’re born from democracy. You know, ‘No taxation without representation.’” Frowning, he mentions the possibility of an apartheid state, without democracy, if all citizens are not treated equally. He chides American Jews to become more involved with the peace process.
“I am not a navi [prophet] and I am not a ben-navi [the son of a prophet],” Yehoshua says softly, before resuming his high-energy exchange.
He’s the author of a play recently produced at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theater, “Can We Walk Together,” about David Ben-Gurion and Zev Jabotinsky and a series of meetings they held in London about their political differences in the 1930s. Yehoshua enjoys sharing the detail that Ben-Gurion once cooked an omelet for Jabotinsky. In 1959, while a student, Yehoshua met with Ben-Gurion — his father’s friend Yitzhak Navon was then Ben Gurion’s political secretary — when he was hired to do research for the prime minister about the Talmudic redactor, Rav Ashi.
While Yehoshua is secular, he’s very interested in questions of religion. He mentions the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon, who for his generation of novelists is like Tolstoy: the rare example of a writer able to bring art and religion together. While Yehoshua invented the film institute in Santiago that was affiliated with the Catholic Church, he admires the ways in which the Catholic Church embraces art in many forms, whether painting, sculpture, music or literature.“I am still waiting for the encounter between Judaism and art.”
A.B. Yehoshua will speak about “The Retrospective” at the 92nd Street Y on Thursday, March 14 at 8 p.m., in conversation with Dan Miron. Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street. Tickets from $24.; He will also speak on Friday, March 15, following Shabbat services at 6:30 p.m., at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, 7 W. 83rd St. Free for members and $25 for non-members (including dinner). Payment must be received by March 14. For information, contact [email protected], (646) 454-3029.
Since its release, A B Yehoshua's 'The Retrospective' has received several excellent reviews that we will be uploading onto our blog shortly.
Here is the first by Moment Magazine's Morris Dickstein.
Dickstein compliments the novel by drawing parallels between the styles of Yehoshua and John Steinbeck, and also makes an interesting link between the novel's protagonist and Yehoshua himself.
'The Retrospective' is available to purchase on our website here: http://www.halbanpublishers.com/showBook.php?file=retrospective.xml&sortby=date.
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter @HalbanPublisher and use the hashtags #TheRetrospective and #ABYehoshua to let us know what you think!
You can also like Halban Publishers on Facebook.
Thanks for reading,
Charlotte - Halban Publishers.
The Milk of Human Kindness
The Retrospective
A. B. Yehoshua
Translated by Stuart Schoffman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2013, $26.00, pp. 336
John Steinbeck concluded his 1939 novelThe Grapes of Wrathwith a startling scene. A young woman who lost her baby offers her breast to a starving man who had given what little food he had to his son. They are stranded by a flood in a rain-soaked barn, marooned by the conditions of the Depression, which have made them all hungry and desperate. The man has not eaten in six days and the warm breast milk may succor him, just as it may alleviate her pain at the loss of her child. Steinbeck’s editors were dismayed, not least because the man and woman were strangers. They urged him to remove or revise the scene, but he insisted that it was the kernel from which the whole novel sprang. For him, it was an emblem of solidarity and survival, a source of hope, biologically rooted in nature itself. (It was later dropped from John Ford’s celebrated film adaptation.)
The Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua places a similar scene at the heart of his latest work,The Retrospective. Whether Steinbeck knew it or not, the image had a long if minor history in classical lore and Renaissance iconography. It was usually called in Latin Caritas Romana, Roman Charity, and centered on a man in prison, sentenced to death by starvation. His daughter visits him there and feeds him secretly from her own breast. In some accounts his jailers are so touched that they set him free. This stark legend becomes a leitmotif in Yehoshua’s novel, whose Hebrew title,Chesed Sepharadi, translates as Spanish (or Sephardic) Charity (or kindness or generosity). An aging Israeli film director, Yair Moses, goes to a historic city in Spain to receive an award at a retrospective of his early work. (Yehoshua himself was once honored in the same city, Santiago de Compostela, and the novel, like John Updike’s Bech stories, reflects some of his public life as an author.) The filmmaker is accompanied by Ruth, his frequent star and longtime mistress, who may be suffering from a serious illness, although she refuses to look into it. His films, richly described in the novel, allude to Yehoshua’s own early stories, and they stir up deep currents of the past. They were written by his old student (and Ruth’s former lover) Trigano, who broke with both of them when they scotched a scene in his script in which she, having given up her baby for adoption, would tender her breast to a hungry old man. Still another version of thisCaritasRomanashows up in an old painting that fortuitously is reproduced in their hotel room.
In this echo chamber of ideas, it would be difficult to do justice to the wealth of themes in Yehoshua’s simple plot or the improbabilities he risks to realize them. Witty, observant, keenly reflective, Moses is in part a surrogate for the author himself, reviewing his fabled career, looking back at the dense, symbolic stories that made him famous almost five decades ago, long before he wrote a full-length novel. Though realistic in detail, those Kafkaesque parables, like “The Yatir Evening Express” and “Facing the Forest,” deftly allegorized Israel’s inner life, its turbulent history, its relation to the Arabs within and without. But film (unlike fiction) is a collaborative art. If Moses’s first works were written by the passionate, obsessive Trigano, this would make him the director’s artistic conscience, his creative demiurge. A figure of Dostoevskian intensity, Trigano bitterly accuses Moses of selling out, betraying his original vision for a popular style, more realistic, more psychological. As it happens, Yehoshua’s later fiction melds both kinds of writing: He is a sharp and gifted realist, yet an aura of larger significance always infuses even his most straightforward novels, such asFive Seasons and The Liberated Bride. Moses needed to distance himself “from this strange and alien spirit that had hypnotized my work.” Had he followed Trigano’s path, he would have offered the world “pretentious stories intelligible only to the cognoscenti.”
Nevertheless, Moses returns to Israel determined to reconcile with his old screenwriter, hoping to rekindle his inspiration by going back to its sources. Pursuing his own personal retrospective, he revisits the locations and recalls the casting and shooting of his early films. These memories evoke the simpler, more provincial Israel of the 1960s, a world in which the intransigent Trigano still lives. Moses finally confronts him in a moshav near the Gaza border, where Trigano is visiting his retarded son. After the wonderfully rendered scenes in Spain, the novel had somewhat lost its way. But in the fraught dialogue between these old collaborators, each considering the other a “failed artist,” the novel comes alive again. Yehoshua delves into the nature of creativity, how the texture of life is transmuted into art, how characters are fashioned from real people and actors intersect with their roles. Moses is forced to come to grips with a coldness, a detachment, in his own nature. He has related to Ruth more as a character he inherited and shaped in his work than as a person or lover, and she in turn has withheld herself from him. By seeking to reconnect with Trigano, he aims to revise the past, to rewrite the moment of refusal and rupture when his life and art may have gone astray.
His former screenwriter’s price, however, is a steep one. The stubborn director, named after the original Hebrew lawgiver, is required to do penance for the scene he cut from their movie by reenacting it himself: He must arrange to be photographed as the old man, his hands bound, nurturing at a young woman’s breast. Of all the unlikely things that take place in the second half of the novel, including his odyssey through those film locations and his relentless fixation on Trigano, this humiliating demand is the most improbable. Yet, against all expectations, the far-fetched turn of events works. As the kind of symbolic situation Yehoshua might have built into his early fiction, it catapults an otherwise conventional novel onto a different plane: Now taking direction, Moses returns to Spain to act out the tableau that holds out the atonement he seeks. A monk who had befriended him earlier, who had even taken his half-serious “confession” in church, finally finds him a woman who will play the part. The novel ends where the old film was intended to end (and exactly where Steinbeck’s noveldidend), in an ambiguous but exhilarating act of “charity,” somewhere between the erotic and the alimentary, between love and nurture. “The inspiration I craved has returned,” Moses thinks, as the warm milk touches his lips. “I am drinking it into the chambers of my heart.”
Yehoshua overloads the ending, even bringing in that May-December couple that embedded itself into so much of Spanish and Western literature, Don Quixote and his fantasy lover, Dulcinea, but it furnishes a coda to the book’s main ideas. For Steinbeck writing in the Depression there was hardly anything sexual about this nurturing image, but from Yehoshua’s perspective “one can never really know the line that divides compassion from passion.” Caregiving is one of the novel’s central motifs, often associated with food, as when Trigano lovingly feeds his helpless son while Moses, who elsewhere displays a hearty appetite, refuses to eat. But bodily nutriment spills over into creative and romantic nourishment. The director must sort out his unexamined feelings about Ruth, part fraternal concern, part sexual attraction, his sense of artistic yet also personal responsibility for the woman whose character he had molded on the screen. In the twilight of his creative life, shadowed by mortality, he looks to reconcile the polar differences in his work—the realistic and the symbolic, the local and the international, the private and the literary—which is exactly the trick Yehoshua brings off in this ambitious, engrossing, playfully testamentary novel.
Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. His most recent book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, received the Ambassador Book Award. He is completing a memoir.
The original review can be found here: http://www.momentmag.com/book-review-the-retrospective/
Here is another review on 'The Retrospective' to continue our celebration of the novel's release today.
Akin Ajayi considers the novel's themes of guilt and atonement, and congratulates Yehoshua on how in 'his inimitable style, Yehoshua crafts a powerful and engaging allegory of modern Israeli Jewish identity'.
Ajayi provides an engaging commentary on the novel and this review is well worth a read.
Don't forget you can purchase the novel on our website http://www.halbanpublishers.com/.
Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @HalbanPublisher and use the hash tags #TheRetrospective and #ABYehoshua to let us know what you think!
You can also like Halban Publishers on Facebook.
Thanks for reading! Charlotte - Halban Publishers
Exploring A.B. Yehoshua through a caricature of himself
Israeli filmmaker Yair Moses, the central figure in A.B. Yehoshua’s newly translated latest novel, arrives in Spain to receive an honor and a prize at the end of a long, successful career, and finds himself having to engage in some unexpected self-reflection
The Retrospective,by A.B. Yehoshua (translated from the Hebrew, “Hesed Sfaradi,” by Stuart Schoffman). Halban Publishers, 382 pages, £10 (U.K.); Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26 (U.S.)
“Ihave no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect,” Sophocles once wrote. Not that this apprehension ever deterred the great and the good throughout history from succumbing to the indulgence of self-reflection. No matter how well-intentioned the attempt, parsing the true meaning of one’s life will make unreasonable demands upon the person. At one extreme, there’s the understandable temptation to selectively excise the inconvenient detail that detracts from a glorious ideal (think politicians and their self-absorbed pursuit of legacy, for example); at the other, engaging the truth with curiosity and candor is a dangerous game, causing one to run the risk of undercutting the certainties that shape one’s sense of self. There is middle ground, but like many accommodations, this leans toward the inconclusive.
“The end is always a compromise between what was and what will never be.” Yair Moses, the main character of “The Retrospective,” A.B. Yehoshua’s newly translated 10th novel, is well placed to make this observation. A celebrated Israeli film director, he has been invited to the Spanish pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela, to participate in a retrospective of his films and to receive a prize for his life’s work. The award flatters, but only slightly; he contemplates suppressing publicity to avoid the tiresome demands of the tax man back home on the modest cash award he is to receive. But he attends all the same, accompanied by Ruth, his cinematic muse and the Israeli actress who has featured in all his films. The precise status of their relationship is unclear, to their hosts and perhaps even to themselves: “At some retrospectives, two rooms are reserved for the director and the actress, because Internet biographies are vague concerning the true nature of their relationship.” Here though, they share a room. His mind, however, turns more toward the professional aspect of their relationship as they arrive in a city steeped in history. “In essence, she is not a partner but a companion, more precisely a character who reappears in his films because he feels obligated to look after her.”
Perhaps no more. Looking ahead, Moses wonders how to break the news that he will not be casting Ruth in his next film, a project as yet undefined except by her absence.
But an unexpected surprise awaits the Israelis at their hotel. On the wall of their room is a painting of an elderly man, bound and blindfolded, suckling at the breast of a young woman. The imagery is ambiguous, and the painting’s title, “Caritas Romana” (literally “Roman Charity”), does little to explain the context of the tableau.
The image in the painting, however, has profound personal significance for Moses: It mirrors the aborted final scene of the last film he made with his early filmmaking collaborator and screenwriter, Shaul Trigano. Their professional relationship, formed when Moses was a young history teacher and Trigano his prodigiously talented pupil, was forged from a shared faith in the higher ideals of artistic integrity and of preferring honesty over baser considerations. Their collaboration ran to several films, dimly remembered but critically satisfying.
The provocative denouement to their last film had been written with Ruth − at the time Trigano’s lover − in mind. But at the last moment she demurs from the script’s demands, to suckle an anonymous beggar in the street just after giving her child up for adoption. There was a confrontation, and Moses took her side, rewriting the script and breaking his artistic pact with Trigano to accommodate her. Cut to the quick, the screenwriter severed his ties with the two; Moses, discovering a new creative freedom, went on to establish a commercially and critically productive career over 30 odd years. Trigano, on the other hand, lapsed into anonymity. The break between the two served the director well, one might surmise. Perhaps.
Titles changed, dialogue dubbed
It’s wishful thinking to assume that once evoked, the memories from Moses’ past will dissipate at will. At first Moses scarcely recognizes the films that have been selected for the retrospective. True, the titles have been changed and the dialogue dubbed, but the disconnect runs deeper. The curation focuses on his early period, on the films that he made with Trigano. A shift in emphasis in his films, earmarked by his break with his collaborator, is duly noted even if the audience does not know the cause. “It seems to us,” Juan De Viola, the priest who is hosting the retrospective, remarks, “that you have turned your back on the surrealistic and symbolic style of your early films, and have become addicted to extreme realism that is almost naturalistic. The question is simple: why?”
Why indeed? As a writer, Yehoshua allows his narratives to emerge through the intricacies of character development and the interplay between characters rather than through grand overarching themes. Moses, the central focus of “The Retrospective,” does something similar, with his persona defined through his engagement with the immediacy of lived experience. It’s not quite the extreme realism of his films, but not far removed. It is not that he is unreflective; if anything, he arguably ruminates on everyday occurrences more than necessary. But he parses life through the certainty of his perspective, the unimpeachable confidence of his knowledge. The abstraction of symbolic interpretation has no appeal for him.
But between the painting on the wall and the retrospective on the screen, through the eerie sensation of watching half-remembered films in a language he doesn’t understand, Moses is prodded from the lingering emotional complacency fed by his success. There is unfinished business with Trigano, a settling of accounts. Almost without realizing it, he finds himself drawn to his murky past.
No one would accuse Yehoshua of suffering from an economy of words, and this lack of concision sometimes imposes a digressive weight on his work. But “The Retrospective” is crafted, on the whole, with an engaging restraint, an acute portrait of Moses’ crisis of confidence, evoked through inference and suggestion. Casual hints and gestures prod the reader in the direction of the director’s milieu: his modest yet subtly bourgeois background, the muted disappointment in the daughter who chooses Africa over Europe − his preference − as destination for her son’s bar mitzvah trip. (“Of all the continents, it’s Africa they choose for the transition from childhood to maturity,” he grumbles to his ex-wife.) His other child lives abroad, in Germany, with children who speak a language he doesn’t understand. His outlook on life is shaped by the conservatism of his surroundings, we come to appreciate.
By way of contrast, Trigano, despite his central place in Moses’ very personal retrospection, never emerges as much more than a rudimentary arrangement in black and white: “a talented young man from a small town in the south of Israel, formerly a transit camp for Jewish immigrants from North Africa.” Yehoshua’s words, but Moses’ thoughts; the reductive characterization is very deliberate. The director respects his screenwriter’s talent, but Trigano − like Ruth − still remains all but invisible to him as a human. Despite an obvious intimacy, Moses evinces an inarticulate but quite palpable ambivalence toward Ruth. Yes, he obsesses over her health, specifically an inconclusive blood test that she refuses to repeat, but his concern comes across as dutiful rather than altruistic. His relationship with Ruth − which, incidentally, led to the end of his first marriage − came about almost by default, and only after Trigano abandoned her to his care. Guilt, rather than genuine affection, is the trigger.
One could argue that as a filmmaker, Moses never conclusively abandoned symbolism in favor of realism, because he never quite understood the symbolic content of his own early films. It is this understanding, made vivid in the book through the tensions that Moses must negotiate between symbolism and realism − in life as on screen − that defines “The Retrospective.” All paths lead, inevitably, to a confrontation with Trigano. The question that remains is not whether this will happen, but what Moses will take from the meeting.
Guilt and atonement
“The Retrospective” is replete with the iconography of guilt and atonement. There are the beginnings of Moses’ epiphany, in a city famous as the end point for Christian pilgrimage and penitence; there is his impulsive decision to take part in the rite of confession in the famous cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, even though he makes it clear that he does not seek absolution. Even as he argues for the superiority of the realism and materialism in his films as against the ephemerality that obtains elsewhere, he finds himself drawn toward using the symbolism of his earlier work to unpick his relationship with the world. And, specifically, with Trigano.
But within this lies a cautionary argument against what one might describe charitably as false enlightenment. Atonement, Yehoshua seems to propose, is of no use unless it comes from a genuine appreciation of the wrongs that warrant it. Duty, especially duty that evolves from a self-serving perspective, can never suffice. The enduring tension that defines “The Retrospective” comes from Trigano’s place in Moses’ internal drama: Must Moses atone for wronging Trigano because it will make Trigano feel good, or because it will make Moses feel good?
While “The Retrospective” is intelligent, sensitive fiction, one cannot help but think that Yehoshua gets a little carried away at times. There is something contrived about the denouement, which takes Moses back to Santiago de Compostela in a quixotic act of penance after he had already returned to Israel. Unsurprisingly, this final stage is tied to the provoking incident, the painting “Caritas Romana” and beyond that the aborted scene from his final collaboration with Trigano. But the thoughtfulness of the symbolism is reduced to borderline farce, so that Moses, at the last, feels like a ridiculous caricature.
But perhaps this is the point. There is danger in reading symbolic intent where none is intended to exist − a point that Moses himself makes, after a viewer at his retrospective proposes a symbolic interpretation for what was actually a pragmatic substitution in one of his films, a surrealist take on a Kafka short story. “We didn’t know about ancient Egypt,” the director replies indulgently, “and perhaps Kafka didn’t either. In any case, the historical dimension you have added ... can only deepen the understanding of our complex film.” Moses, who has recast himself as a realist filmmaker, is being ironic. But one can also make the mistake of failing to recognize symbolic intent even when it is hiding in plain sight.
One must recall that as a writer, A.B. Yehoshua has always been preoccupied with the visceral reality of Israeli identity, of the relationship between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Oriental and Occidental. The troubled relationship between Moses and Trigano has a concrete resonance that does not, in itself, require abstraction. But the symbolism is there nonetheless. As Yehoshua enters the twilight of a long and rightly celebrated literary career, it would be easy to draw parallels between Yair Moses, the celebrated director, and Abraham Yehoshua, the celebrated writer. But the potency of “The Retrospective” lies elsewhere: In his inimitable style, Yehoshua crafts a powerful and engaging allegory of modern Israeli Jewish identity. It might be a truism to observe baldly that Sephardic identity is an autonomous construct, not dependent on the munificence of Israel’s elite classes. But this is a point that eludes Moses, and Yehoshua, I think, worries that it might elude others too.
Akin Ajayi is a freelance writer and editor based in Tel Aviv.
The Jewish Chronicle's review of The Retrospective
Halban Publishers are proud to have published A. B. Yehoshua's 'The Retrospective' today (February 14). To celebrate the occasion, here is a review of the novel by The Jewish Chronicle. Read it below and let us know on Twitter if you've bought the novel today. #TheRetrospective #ABYehoshua.
Charlotte - Halban Publishers
Moses amid the rushes
A B Yehoshua's latest novel depicts an ageing hero who looks back at life and Jewishness through film
By David Herman, February 8, 2013
Follow The JC on Twitter
The Retrospective/ By A B Yehoshua/ Halban, £9.99
A B Yehoshua: a meditation on Jewish-Christian relations, atonement, reconciliation and, above all, the past
A.B. Yehoshua’s latest novel is a story in two halves. It begins in Spain, in Santiago de Compostela, where Yair Moses, an Israeli film director, has come to attend a retrospective season of his films. Like Yehoshua himself, Moses is in his 70s. He has come with Ruth, his leading lady. It feels like a great director’s last hurrah, looking back over his work — and his life.
Moses reflects on his relationships with three people: Ruth, who was always more than just his leading actress; Toledano, his late cinematographer; and, above all, Shaul Trigano, his one-time student and then screenwriter and collaborator until the two men fell out bitterly .
The second half of the novel takes Moses back to Israel. He has a favour to ask of Trigano. The screenwriter, still angry after all these years, has his price. Moses must commit an act of atonement, an act which takes us back to an image which haunts the novel from the very beginning.
The Retrospective is a novel about the past, represented in one man’s history and Jewish history (as one might guess form the director’s surname). From the start, the location, Santiago de Compostela, might ring a few bells. It was one of the most famous medieval pilgrimage sites, a resonant name in the history of Christianity. The novel will turn out to be, in part, about the relations between Christianity and the Jews — and about forgiveness, atonement and reconciliation.
As if this isn’t enough, there are fascinating references to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, to Franco’s Spain, present-day Israel and even a Jewish story by Kafka, a lifelong passion of Yehoshua’s. But, above all, the book examines our relationship with the past.
Quietly, reflectively, Yehoshua circles round these questions. At one point, someone tells Moses that his mother believes in the film-maker’s future. “’My future?’ blushes Moses. ‘At my age?’” Moses hardly dare believe that he has a future; looking back, he sees “a career in slow decline”. He looks at his early films in disbelief. They seem remote, far away.
As for the present, says Moses, “‘the pot is still empty… and the fire’s still out.’” And yet, perhaps there is still time to find meaning at the end of his life, an act that might restore the relationships that really matter to him and bring a kind of fulfilment when he is still so troubled and melancholy.
The Retrospective has already won two literary prizes in France. It is a truly international book, a serious set of reflections about coming to terms with the past — with a surprising ending.
A B Yehoshua will be in conversation with Jonathan Freedland at Jewish Book Week on Sunday 24 February. David Herman is the JC’s chief fiction reviewer
origamiaround
blakekathryn
vaporwave
pixelskylines
areudirty
dailybridgerton