Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

The Liberated Bride

Name: The Liberated Bride
Author: A. B. Yehoshua
ISBN: 9780156030168

by A. B. Yehoshua, Hillel Halkin

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Overview

Yochanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.

Synopsis

The New York Times

The Liberated Bride is a magnificent, often comic, and humanely inexorable journey among Israel's Jews and their secret and denied sharers: its Arabs … Yehoshua has written a darkly scintillant comedy, centered around Rivlin's obsessive pilgrimage; a comedy that occasionally gestures at tragedy without trying to summon it. At the same time, the author involves him in a different journey, equally brilliant and more astonishing. — Richard Eder

About the Author, A. B. Yehoshua

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.

An author, journalist, and internationally reknowned, awarding-winning translator, Hillel Halkin has translated several novels from Hebrew into English.

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Editorials

The New Yorker

The three brides at the center of this gentle novel all refuse to do what Yochanan Rivlin, an aging Israeli professor of Near Eastern studies, wishes them to do. Samaher, a depressed Palestinian graduate student who is newly married, won’t finish her seminar paper; Galya, soon to be a mother, won’t tell him why she divorced his son; and Rivlin’s wife, Hagit, a district judge, won’t let him worry himself to death about it. Yehoshua, the most daring of the major Israeli writers, tells a simple story about a region that complicates all it touches. As Rivlin’s obsession with his son’s failed marriage grows, he also finds himself drawn into the world of his Palestinian student. The juxtaposition of a failed marriage and the turmoil of Israeli society suggests pointed political commentary, but Yehoshua’s portrait of the hesitant courtship between the two peoples—sometimes tender and generous, sometimes grotesque and calamitous—remains, somehow, hopeful.

The New York Times

Library Journal

Yohannon Rivlin is a senior professor at Haifa University, an engaging scholar who travels in both the Jewish and the Arab worlds. At the opening, he attends the wedding of a talented female graduate student (an Arab from Galilee), which sets him wondering (he does so easily) about the curiously failed marriage of his son. Visiting his ailing mentor in the hospital, he learns of the death of his son's former father-in-law, causing him to renew ties to that family. As the mystery of the failed marriage deepens, Rivlin comes by a valuable cache of papers shedding light on his research area, Algerian history. He enlists the help of the new bride, whose marriage has question marks of its own, in translating and sorting the papers. The title word liberated is both ironic and informative (new bride, ex-bride, and so on), and a high point of the book is the interplay between Rivlin and his wife, Hagit, a judge. This is a great read from one of Israel's premier authors, by turns profoundly funny and simply profound-there's a deep understanding of interpersonal relationships regardless of geography. Strongly recommended for all fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/03.]-Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A multilayered story from the fine Israeli novelist (Returning Lost Loves, 2001, etc.) mixes the personal and political as a historian seeks explanations for two seemingly disconnected events: his son’s divorce and an outbreak of violence in Algeria. The setting is post-Intifada Israel, the protagonist Rivlin, a middle-aged professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Haifa. His wife Hagit is a judge, and the couple have two sons, Tsakhi, an army officer, and Ofer, who moved to Paris after his wife, Galya, abruptly divorced him. Rivlin, convinced that in private lives as in public events there must be "signs, early warnings, by which a serious scholar looking unflinchingly at the present could unlock the past," is engaged in two missions. One involves turning to the literature of the past to find the cause of Algeria’s troubles, and the other, to finding the cause of Ofer’s sudden divorce. As he conducts the first search, Rivlin becomes involved with the family of student Samaher, whose wedding he and Hagit attend. Samaher is mysteriously ill, and cannot attend classes, but wants her degree, so Rivlin asks her to translate some Algerian writings, written under French rule. Her cousin Rashid acts as her courier. A mysterious, almost mythical figure, Rashid takes Rivlin into the Palestinian territories, where Rivlin finds his understanding of Arab culture deepening. But his personal search is more frustrating. Visiting the Jerusalem hotel Galya’s family owns, he learns that her father has just died. Something happened in that hotel that caused the divorce, and, while Rivlin searches for the truth, he recalls his own past, attends a provocative Palestinian literary festival, and learnsthat Galya, who remarried, is pregnant. Rivlin is heartsore about the divorce, but some ease comes to him when a conscience-stricken Galya visits, ready to confide. Historical causes are less easily discerned as Arab-Israeli tensions grow worse. A splendidly realized search for the causes of ruptures that rend families and nations: both timely and timeless.