Testing Tolerance: Cultural Diversity and National Unity in A. B. Yehoshua's A Journey to the End of the Millennium

GILEAD MORAHG Testing Tolerance: Cultural Diversity and National Unity in A. B. Yehoshua's A Journey to the End of the Millennium The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral. D. H. Lawrence A. B. YEHOSHUA'S RECENT NOVEL, A journey to the End of the Millennium, is a work that invites interpretation. In many ways it marks a return to its author's early allegorical mode, but in a manner that is complicated and enriched by facets of Yehoshua's more realistic and psychologically oriented later works. The underlying allegorical attributes are infused with the author's compassion for his characters, his interest in their internal development, and his passion for moral exploration . The capacity to penetrate the psyches of the characters and to have them undergo development and change is made part of a complex structure of symbolic signification. One marker of the novel's allegorical orientation is the fact that, although the story is set one thousand years in the past, A journey to the End of the Millennium is not given the temporal span, narrative scope, and local detail of a typical historical novel. This is a very narrowly focused work. It concentrates on the actions and interactions of a small group of Jewish characters moving through a medieval landscape that is only lightly sketched in and remains largely abstract. PROOFTEXTS 19 (1999): 235-256 C 1999 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 236GILEAD MORAHG The evocation of local scenes and period customs is governed by a tight economy of thematic needs and rendered in spare, almost minimalistic, strokes. The invitation to interpretation is extended further by the quality of the narrator's voice and the nature of the narrative strategies he employs. The narrator of A Journey to the End ofthe Millennium does not seek to be transparent. He is a palpable presence who relishes telling the tale, commenting on it, and inviting his audience to join him in speculating about its implications. Yehoshua has claimed that the voice of this narrator is essentially that of a "chronicler who was not of the same period, but not a modern narrator either."1 This is a misleading characterization . The narrator clearly infuses his story with a sense of the past by casting it in a literary register that is associated with earlier modes of Hebrew writing: a lush, somewhat archaic, vocabulary and a poetic, often idiosyncratic, turn of phrase. But this richly textured and elegantly crafted prose is sprinkled with a tincture ofmodern allusions and Hebrew neologisms that indicate that the story is a recent construct with distinct contemporary significations.2 Far from being a mere chronicler, the narrator of A Journey to the End of the Millennium is a deliberate, and very sophisticated, storyteller who readily sacrifices chronological sequence to narrative need and factual veracity to imaginative possibility. He withholds information for narrative effect, as no chronicler should. He records his characters' deepest emotions and innermost thoughts, as no chronicler could. This is a narrator who sets the scenes, motivates the characters, and charts the plot in order to advance an ambitious thematic agenda.3 The action of A Journey to the End ofthe Millennium is initiated by the decision of Ben Attar, a wealthy merchant from Tangier, to save his business partnership with his beloved nephew, Abulafia, a young widower whose wife had committed suicide and left him with a retarded daughter. While serving as Ben Attar's agent in Europe, Abulafia had fallen in love with an Ashkenazi woman, Esther-Minna, and married her. A childless widow, Esther-Minna is an educated and strongly independent woman from a scholarly family in Worms. When she discovers that her new husband's uncle and chief partner has two wives, Esther-Minna is outraged. She proclaims her profound aversion to this uncle and demands that Abulafia dissolve his· partnership with him. Abulafia acquiesces, and Ben Attar, who loves his nephew dearly and values his qualities as a merchant, is so affronted that he sets out with his two wives, his Muslim partner, and a shipload of merchandise to confront the...