Volume 46, Number 11 · June 24, 1999
The Jew from Tangier
By Anthony Grafton
A Journey to the End of the Millennium: A Novel
by A.B. Yehoshua
Doubleday, 309 pp., $24.95
Reading A.B. Yehoshua can make a historian like myself uneasy. The Israeli novelist knows me and my colleagues too well: this explorer of the most diverse individual psyches, young and old, male and female, ancient and modern, showed his usual acuteness when he made one of his characters express our methods, questions, and obsessions. In A Late Divorce, published in 1984, Asa Kaminka—a young university teacher in Jerusalem, sullen and emotional—exhibits the two deep-seated, contradictory drives that make historians function. As a teacher, Asa uses an impressive mastery of detail, a passionate delivery, and dramatic gestures to re-create the lost world of the Russian radicals of the late nineteenth century. The humane revolutionaries Vera Zasulich and Vinarofsky, fearless in their attacks on enemies of the people and equally firm in their refusal to harm the innocent, make vivid appearances in his lectures.
Review, 3726 words
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