Passover and Hanukkah in A. B. Yehoshua's Opus and Ethos

To explore whether secular culture in Israel can be more than a "thin brittle crust" that will crumble "at a time of crisis or conflict," A. B. Yehoshua constructs fictional scenarios in which holidays are celebrated under particularly stressful circumstances for his characters. A Late Divorce (1982) races toward a Passover seder and engages systematically with this holiday's theme of freedom. Friendly Fire (2007) is set during Hanukkah and tallies each candle that Amotz Ya'ari lights with family members in Israel, while his wife lights none in Africa. Yehoshua's two historical novels, Mr Mani (1990) and A Journey to the End of the Millennium (1997), incorporate the high holiday season into their plots, generating a historiosophic conversation about Jewish beliefs and behaviors in the past and the present. Although Yehoshua's holiday scenarios undermine religious belief, his engagement with them actually aims to reinvigorate the relevance of historical markers of Jewish identity. He argues that national reform does not entail "easing the burden imposed by religion," but rather exposure of the traditional commandments "to the complexities of life, to observe them while changing them." Yehoshua's holiday scenarios thus operate as much more than mere folkloric backdrop to position his fiction within a Jewish timeframe: he uses holiday settings to critique traditional practices and beliefs, yet he does so to paradoxically strengthen a modern program of national Jewish reformation. This essay showcases Yehoshua's critique of national identity through holiday scenarios in A Late Divorce (Passover) and Friendly Fire (Hanukkah).