Friendly Fire: A Duet

A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Amotz, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Daniella, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister. There she confronts her anguished seventy-year-old brother-in-law, Yirmiyahu, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by “friendly fire." Yirmiyahu is now managing a team of African researchers digging for the bones of man’s primate ancestors as he desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.  
With great artistry, A. B. Yehoshua has once again written a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways.

A long-married couple are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Daniella has flown from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister with her brother-in-law Yirmiyahu, a retired diplomat. In short parallel chapters, alternating between Africa and Israel, the story follows the busy husband Amotz, a designer of elevators, as he juggles the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, children, and grandchildren. Alongside unfolds the confrontation between his wife and her anguished seventy-year-old brother-in-law, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by the "friendly fire" of his comrades. Now working as the manager of a team of African researchers digging from the bones of man's primate ancestors, Yirmiyahu desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.

With consummate artistry, A.B. Yehoshua has composed a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways.

Publishers Weekly

Celebrated Israeli novelist Yehoshua (A Woman in Jerusalem) explores the power of grief and bitterness in a blunt drama studded with political, historical and religious significance. In Tel Aviv, 60-year-old Amotz Ya'ari is separated for a week from his wife Daniela when she flies to Tanzania to mourn her dead sister, Shuli, and visit with brother-in-law Yirmi. Soon after Daniela arrives in Tanzania, where Yirmi works for a team of archeologists at an excavation, it becomes apparent that another death-that of Yirmi and Shuli's son, an Israeli soldier who was killed by friendly fire seven years before the novel begins-preoccupies the family. Back in Tel Aviv, Amotz, both professionally and personally, shows himself to be a compassionate and deeply moral man-a striking counterpoint to his self-centered wife. The scenes at Yirmi's dig are lit with hope for Africa's future, though the narration can be naïve about the continent's present and tends to caricaturize Daniela. In contrast, Yehoshua's descriptions of life in Israel are full and revelatory, and his despairing view of entrenched resentments becomes a stirring plea for empathy and rationality. (Nov.)

A. B. YEHOSHUA is one of Israel's preeminent writers. His novels include Journey to the End of the Millenium, The Liberated Bride, and A Woman in Jerusalem, which was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2007. He lives in Haifa.