Traditions and Transitions in Israel Studies: Books on Israel, Volume VI

9. Literature as a Response to Paradox: On Reading A. B. Yehoshua’s A Journey to the End of the Millennium

9. Literature as a Response to Paradox: On Reading A. B. Yehoshua’s A Journey to the End of the Millennium Stephen Schecter, Université du Québec à Montréal This essay offers personal reflections on A. B. Yehoshua’s A Journey to the End of the Millennium, along with an assessment of the critical and interpretive attention that novel has attracted. The author discusses Yehoshua’s fictional account of Ashkenazi-Sephardi encounters, ostensibly from a period over a thousand years ago, in terms of themes that illuminate contemporary Israeli dilemmas. The author also considers the historical and moral lessons to be learned from imaginative literature laden with paradox. Shamir, Ziva, and Aviva Doron, eds., “A Journey to the End of the Millennium”: Studies in A. B. Yehoshua’s Novel, Tel Aviv: haKibbutz ha-Meuhad, 1999 (in Hebrew: “Masot ‘al Tom ha-Elef”: Iyyunim be-Roman shel Alef Bet Yehoshua). Yehoshua, A. B., Mas’a el Tom ha-Elef, Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuhad, 1997 (translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange as A Journey to the End of the Millennium, New York: Doubleday, 1998). 203 In A. B. Yehoshua’s novel, A Journey to the End of the Millennium, the principal protagonist’s Ishmaelite partner is described at the end of the book as clinging “to his view that the whole of this great journey, on sea and by land, was totally unnecessary, for Jews by their very nature are incapable of achieving a final and decisive judgment” (p. 263). The judgment to which he refers is the one the hero of the novel, Ben Attar, sought in his contest with his nephew’s wife. The contest hinges on the question of polygamy. Ben Attar, a North African Jew living in the tenth century, has a thriving commerce going, one end of which penetrates into the Atlas Mountains via his Ishmaelite partner; the other reaches the towns of Western Europe via the diligent efforts of his nephew, who left his native Tangier after his wife committed suicide. But when the nephew marries a woman from the lands of Ashkenaz, the partnership is placed under a ban by the nephew’s new wife, who cannot stomach the fact that Ben Attar has two wives. Ben Attar hires a ship and sets out for Paris with his two wives and his Ishmaelite partner to prove to the woman that dual matrimony can and does work. On the way they pick up a rabbi from Seville, who was to argue Ben Attar’s case before the Bet Din that was to judge the matter. In a winery outside of Paris a court is set up and the verdict goes in Ben Attar’s favor. When the nephew’s wife then threatens to divorce him, they all agree to journey to Worms and submit to a second trial, there in the wife’s hometown. This time the verdict goes against Ben Attar. On the journey back to Paris his second wife dies, enabling the partnership to be resumed. But even though Ben Attar seems to come to some kind of emotional insight with respect to his singular matrimonial status, he returns with a bitter sense of defeat and irreparable loss. As he tells this to the rabbi from Seville on the ship that is now on its journey home, the latter merely takes up his quill and starts to pen the first line to another poem. The line reads as follows: “Is there a sea between us, that I should not turn aside to visit thee. . . .” (p. 309). And on that note the book ends. Such are the barest of the story’s bones, but enough to give the reader of this essay some idea of its fantastical nature. When one has finished it, one is amazed and perplexed. I find myself nodding at the Ishmaelite’s words, as would anyone who knows anything of the workings of a Jewish organization. What Jew ever listens to 204 Stephen Schecter another Jew? What Jew is ever persuaded by another Jew of anything ? What Jewish organization ever sticks to a decision when someone always has a better idea after the decision was taken? And yet, Jewish organizations thrive, a Jewish country exists, and was built from scratch out of the dream in a Viennese journalist’s head who said that if you shall want it, it is not a dream, even though...