A Woman in Jerusalem

De: A. B. Yehoshua, Hillel Halkin - translator

Narrado por: Rob Shapiro

A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape—she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful—he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love.

At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.

©2004 A. B. Yehoshua and Hillel Halkin (P)2019 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

So artificial story !

Artificial story with very little sense. Literature itself is OK but what is in it ? Would not recommend to anybody. returning the book.

A bit of black humor

This title like Yehoshua’s The Lover has as its background an ordinary Israeli business, which brings the mundane into focus. Israel is a land of immigrants, some newer than others and some there illegally or on the fringes of legality, as in this case. Bombings in Israel while always tragic are not an unexpected phenomena, more so during the intifadas. The story is about one of the immigrants on the fringes of society. What is the responsibility of an Israeli, in particular, of her employer, when the immigrant is a victim of a bombing? The book has plenty of comedic elements including the surprise ending.