Mr. Yehoshua won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction with “Mr. Mani ”(1992), which follows the wandering of six generations of the Sephardic Mani family in critical periods of Jewish history. Each of its five chapters consists of the dialogue of a single speaker telling a story to another character, with the answers missing from this listener being implied in the remarks of the first character. To complicate matters, the novel goes back in time. Although evocatively played out in Israel, Mr. Yehoshua’s novels are full of themes that connect them to the modern Western canon. (Mr. Bloom included “A Late Divorce” in an abundant list of works that he considered to be the rule). As critic Jerome Greenfield wrote in 1979: “Amidst the existential despair, pessimism, disillusionment and alienation that pervade his work, Yehoshua bridges the gap between modern Israeli writing and a dominant stream of some of our best Western literature. . age.” Saul Bellow called Mr. Yehoshua “one of Israel’s world-class writers.” His books have been translated into 28 languages. He won the State Prize, awarded annually by the state for significant cultural contributions, and in 2005 was nominated for the first International Man Booker Prize, which was then awarded for an entire project. “With a wave of his imaginative wings,” Mr. Grossman, the Israeli novelist, wrote of Mr. Yehoshua in an email, “Israel – it ‘s surreal.” Some critics have seen Yehoshua’s novels and short stories as allegories of his yellow stance on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Others rejected such interpretations. In a review of “A Late Divorce”, Walter Goodman, a critic of the Times, wrote that the Israeli characters in the novel “use money, sex, food, humor, affection, cruelty to hold each other, to punish each other “and that the novel” has nothing to do with the West Bank “.
