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    A Woman in Jerusalem: A Novel
    A Woman in Jerusalem: A Novel
    A Woman in Jerusalem: A Novel
    Ebook266 pages3 hours

    A Woman in Jerusalem: A Novel

    By A.B. Yehoshua and Hillel Halkin

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This novel about the struggle to identify a nameless victim in the wake of a terrorist bombing in Israel is “a masterpiece” (Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review).
     
    A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies unidentified in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of “gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee,” the bakery’s owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of figuring out who she was, and burying her, to a human resources man.
     
    This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman’s life take shape—she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful—he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love.
     
    At once profoundly serious, absorbingly suspenseful, and darkly humorous, A Woman in Jerusalem is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize from the renowned author of The Extra and the New York Times Notable Book A Journey to the End of the Millennium.
     
    “An elegantly structured, thoroughly accessible story, albeit one with rich philosophical layers . . . moves us with deep insights into the meaning of home, belonging and the fate of the stranger.” —Miami Herald
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateAug 6, 2007
    ISBN9780547546841
    Author

    A.B. Yehoshua

    A. B. YEHOSHUA (1936-2022) was born in Jerusalem to a Sephardi family. Drawing comparisons to William Faulkner and described by Saul Bellow as “one of Israel's world-class writers”, Yehoshua, an ardent humanist and titan of storytelling, distinguished himself from contemporaries with his diverse exploration of Israeli identity. His work, which has been translated into twenty-eight languages, includes two National Jewish Book Award winners (Five Seasons and Mr. Mani) and has received countless honors worldwide, including the International Booker Prize shortlist and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Woman in Jerusalem).

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    Reviews for A Woman in Jerusalem

    3.5/5

    106 ratings12 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I seem to have liked this book much, much more than its other reviewers. What struck me most was the narrative of this story. It was so tight and telling about one particular situation. The flow of the story was missing no details (except for the names of the characters, but that only made the story much more creative and its telling much more difficult). It was so well directed.A lapse by a (nameless) human resources manager in a large baking operation was named by a newspaper article as the reason for the death of a middle age woman in a terrorist bombing in the city of Jerusalem, Israel. The (nameless) owner of this company wants a no-holds-barred effort made to absolve his company of any wrong-doing and appoints the human resources manager to be in charge of this. How he goes about doing this is the story of his efforts to bring Yulia Ragayev (our deceased woman) to her final resting place.I thought this story was brilliant. It is not about Israel or about Jerusalem, yet it is because we hear thoughts about the country and the city subtly spoken by many of the characters. Funny in places (not the laugh-out-loud kind, but the absurd kind), this story was a delight to read - especially the ending. This is the kind of story in which the reader has to just suspend his disbelief in what happens and play along with the author. Enjoy the characters and the trip (which is a long one!). You will be justly rewarded.
    • 4/5
      "A Woman in Jerusalem" begins with the discovery by a baking tycoon that a former employee has died and her corpse has languished in the morgue for a week. Worse, a second-rate journalist eager for a wider readership has picked up and sensationalized the story to make the baking company look bad.The acting and somewhat reluctant HR director has a fairly cyincal view of the company owner's motivation when he is assigned a damage-control function. He investigates the case, and the first thing he learns is that everyone except himself thinks the woman who died was beautiful, engaging, and caring. Even though he interviewed her before her hire, the HR director cannot remember her. What follows is a trek from Israel to Russia - the corpse, the HR director, the journalist, and the dead woman's unruly son - to have the woman buried in her home town. What happens along the way is really the story here.The trek means something different to each of our questors. The story deals principally with the HR director (all characters except the deceased are identified only by their titles), who knows something is missing from his life. On the way he is physically and morally purged, and returns to Jerusalem a new man. It's nothing very obvious, but we know of the change, nonetheless.This is a story about individual and communal courage in the face of terrorism. It's also about the extraordinary steps that are sometimes necessary to maintain one's humanity under this constant threat. Mr. Yehoshua has spun an engaging, honest tale, and the sometimes stilted language is a purposeful thing, reflective of the mechanistic workings of modern corporations.
    • 3/5
      A seemingly simple storyline that leaves a lot of food for thought about what it takes to be humane in far from humanistic circumstances. Reminded me of home and made me want to read the original Hebrew.
    • 3/5
      I read this book many years ago as a young woman and loved it. Now many years later, it still is a wonderful story of a young girl growing up surrounded by poverty but maintaining an innocence of heart. There is not one ounce of cynicism in Francie's entire body; something that is rare today.I read many of the negative reviews from young people who have been required to read the book. It is so difficult for them to get past the differences of today's age and then; however, hopefully some will have inspiring teachers who will be able to get them through the details enough in order to see the universal story of perseverance and strength of family.This book is not a page turner, has dated dialogue and writing style, and is probably not for everyone. However, it is a warm, pleasant, inspiring read that should at least be tasted.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant treatment of a man on a mission to find out who the victim of a suicide bomber really is. Brings a modern sensibility to a classic topic: what becomes of the nameless lost to senseless war?
    • 4/5
      An anonymous woman is killed in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, and her body lies unidentified and unclaimed. A recent pay stub is found among her belongings, and a news weekly publishes an article, calling the company uncaring and negligent. The elderly owner calls on his human resources manager to uncover the truth and salvage the company's reputation. The human resources manager, recently divorced, is dealing with problems of his own. But he has no choice. Researching personnel records, he discovers the woman was an immigrant from one of the countries in the former Soviet Union, and had come to the city for religious reasons. Although trained as an engineer, she was employed as a cleaning woman on the night shift. She was recently let go, but an apparent clerical error resulted in her continuing to receive wages. The human resources manager meets with her supervisor, learns some interesting details, and finds himself personally committed to locating the woman's family and making arrangements for burial. This becomes a journey of atonement and, while it was initially intended simply to clear the company's name, the human resources manager begins to view it as a personal quest, even though he did not know the woman personally.Yehoshua's prose is terse and understated. The characters do not have names. Yet I found myself caught up in the story, sympathizing with the human resources manager, and mourning with the woman's family. I couldn't put this down and finished it in an afternoon.
    • 4/5
      This is a thought-provoking book that will probably keep me thinking about it long after this reading. A woman was killed in a terrorist bombing incident in Jerusalem. The only clue to her identity is a pay stub, bearing her payroll ID number instead of her name. When the employers didn't come looking for her, a reporter came looking for them. They discovered that although she was still on payroll. The bakery's owner has the human resources manager investigate and then take care of handling details with the victim's family to try to avoid additional negative press. The plot takes interesting turns along the way. One of the most intriguing things about the novel is that the victim is about the only person with a name. Normally this would be confusing to a reader, but I never confused characters as I was reading. A very unusual and intriguing book!
    • 4/5
      An identified woman is killed in a Jerusalem suicide bombing, and the only clue to her identity is a pay stub from a prominent bakery. A journalist uses the situation to attack the bakery for callousness in allowing the woman's body to remain in the morgue unidentified. The owner of the bakery delegates responsibility of the situation to the company's human resources manager, who undertakes to solve the mystery of the woman's identity. At times a mystery story and at times a humorous take on the outcomes of our best efforts, the novel is also a commentary on how people can interact without ever truly seeing the other person. And how people can end up interconnected with the most unlikely of other people if we do open our eyes to the possibilities of human relationships.
    • 3/5
      Difficult as it is to admit, it required over 150 pages for me to recognize that only the deceased woman of the title was actually afforded a name, everyone else had a title or a relation to the protagonist. This creates an intenional level of abstraction, wich is effective to a point, but shorns away the humanity of a story which actually points back to Antigone. I don't know, I expected more.
    • 4/5
      A human resources manager in Jerusalem finds his job more demanding than he anticipated when he is delegated to research the death of an obscure employee killed in a suicide bombing. His long night takes some curious twists as he pieces together the mystery of the deceased woman. Yulia Ragayev, the only character in the book whose name is revealed, was tied to the company by an erroneous pay stub. This led to the tabloid article by a wiley reporter known as the weasel which adversely portrayed the bakery where she had been employed as a cleaner. The aging owner accepts complete responsibility when he asks: ?What is left to us if we lose our humanity?? This is the impetus that leads to the human resource director?s odyssey of atonement in Part 2. What began as a work assignment becomes a mission driven by humanity.This is just one of the layers in this profound book that explores what it is like to live and die in a complicated world where terrorism and ethnicity influence who we are and how we live. Like a good parable, the meaning is not spelled out. The transformation of perspective comes through reading between the lines and seeing beyond the lifeless body of the woman in Jerusalem. Don?t be fooled by the brevity of this book?the subtle deeper layers will occupy your mind long after the final page is read.
    • 3/5
      The theme of this book is the responsibility of an employer for its employees. An engineer that immigrated to Jerusalem and works as a cleaning lady for a large bakery is killed in a bus bombing in Jerusalem. She remains in a coma and unidentified for over a week. Eventually a journalist makes a sensational story out of it by connecting her to the bakery by a paystub…and then slams the employer for not knowing that she was missing. The human resources director of the company, in response to the newspaper story, finds himself first uncovering why she was “fired” but still being paid, then in charge of the company’s response. This takes him off on an incredulous journey to the woman’s homeland, connecting with her son, and deciding where and how to bury the body.The hardest part for me to understand was the premise that the employer should have noticed that the woman wasn’t coming to work. Once they determined she had been “fired” and thus wasn’t expected at work – well, who would have missed her?? But, I worry that this is a very western point of view, different in the Middle East where missing people are more alarming. Frankly, I thought it was more appalling that the family that were her neighbors and landlord didn’t try and found out where she had gone. Again, from my western point of view the neighbors would be the first to note her absence and might have followed up with an employer. Thus, I found the premise of the book somewhat unbelievable, though unsure if it is just my western perspective or a true challenge of the writing.Still, I enjoyed the author’s writing, particularly the bizarre relationship between the company owner and the human resources director, and some of the adventures in the woman’s homeland. I found the descriptions of scenes particularly compelling – the woman’s home, the abandoned military post, areas of Jerusalem.Overall, I really enjoyed the setting of this book and the premise was interesting but somehow it seemed unfinished.
    • 4/5
      This is a fast-paced, plot dominated novel that rings lots of bells and leaves the reader at the end laughing out loud but also seriously exploring the issues it raises. The main character is “the human resources manager” of a large Jerusalem bakery. He used to be the top salesman but was transferred when extensive travel interfered with his home life. His wife divorced him anyway. The main focus of the novel is a corpse—and oddly the only character with a name—Yulia Ragayev, a non-Jewish immigrant from an unnamed Slavic country who came to Jerusalem with a Jewish lover who abandoned her. Her son went back to his father but Yulia remained, employed as a cleaner (though she a trained engineer) at the bakery. She comes to the human resources manager’s attention when a weekly scandal rag accuses the company of “gross negligence” in not caring what happened to her. Her body has been in the morgue, unidentified, a week after she was killed in a terrorist attack. The reporter found a pay stub from the bakery in her possession.Other main characters include the owner of the bakery who wants his human resources manager to turn around the negative publicity the company will get from the reporter’s soon-to-be-published article, the human resources manager’s assistant (with her husband and baby to say nothing of the human resources manager’s daughter and ex-wife) as well as the owner’s assistant and a night manager who was Yulia’s boss, and who, it turns out, is “responsible” for the fact that Yulia had a pay stub but was not in fact working at the bakery. There’s the reporter and the photographer and eventually the honorary consul (located in the unnamed Slavic country) and her husband. Oh, yes, Yulia’s son and her ex-husband.The situation escalates as the investigation progresses. It turns out that Yulia was beautiful, fair with unusual Tartar eyes. The night manager had let her go because he’d become obsessed with her and the human resources manager, even though he refuses to look at her corpse, becomes similarly obsessed. He is “blamed” for the situation—he is after all the human resources manager and as such responsible for any irregularities connected with personnel. And it also turns out that he interviewed Yulia—he has his notes on what she told him—without remembering either her person or her plight. The escalating situation raises touchy issues connected with what happens to immigrants and the effects of living with terrorism as well as nationality and what that means. Even more it raises issues of responsibility for what happens to individuals in a complex society.I won’t give you any more of the plot—you need to read it for yourself. It’s a quick read, but one that will stick with you.

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    A Woman in Jerusalem - A.B. Yehoshua

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