Israeli author Avraham Yehoshua, winner of the 2012 Foreign Medici Prize and figure of the Israeli anti-occupation left, has died at the age of 85, the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv announced on Tuesday.
Born in Jerusalem in December 1936 to parents of Greek and Moroccan origin, he published his first short stories in 1963. Since then, his novels and plays have been translated from Hebrew into more than 30 languages, including French. In 1995, he received the Israel Prize, the most important cultural recognition in the country. And in 2012, he won the Prix Médicis in the foreign books category for “Retrospective” (Grasset), translated from Hebrew by Jean-Luc Allouche.
For Nitza Ben-Dov, professor of literature at the University of Haifa (north) who taught alongside him, Yehoshua was Israel’s “greatest author”. “He went from surreal and dreamy stories, disconnected from time and space, to works rooted in Israeli culture and the present,” she told AFP. His later work was steeped in psychology, influenced by his psychoanalyst wife, according to Ms Ben-Dov. “Warm and open”, eager for recognition, he could also be biting in the face of his interlocutors, according to Ms. Ben-Dov. “He was a complex man whose attitude towards the world was ambivalent. His awareness of the complexity of Man, which he drew from his own experience, made his work plural”.
A defender of the rights of the Palestinians, Yehoshua was a member of B’Tselem, an Israeli organization for the defense of human rights and fervent opponent of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories by Israel. This association praised on Tuesday a man who “devoted his time and energy to equality, peace and human rights for all”. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett lamented the disappearance of “a man who had helped shape Israeli culture”. “Yehoshua was a pillar of Israeli literature, whose words many people had read,” Bennett added on his Twitter account.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also paid tribute to him. The writer’s work “was inspired by our homeland and the cultural treasures of our people, portraying us in a fine portrait, faithful, compassionate and sometimes reflecting a painful image of ourselves”, he said in a statement. “He evoked in us a mosaic of deep feelings,” he added. Avraham Yehoshua is to be laid to rest Wednesday at the Ein Carmel cemetery in northern Israel.
Israeli author Avraham Yehoshua, winner of the Medici Foreign Prize in 2012 and a figure of the Israeli anti-occupation left, died at the age of 85, the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv announced on Tuesday. Born in Jerusalem in December 1936 of parents with Greek and Moroccan origins, he had published his first short stories in 1963. Since then, his novels and plays have been…