Human Resources, Personal Effects
By PERETZ RODMAN
A Woman in Jerusalem
By A. B. Yehoshua
Translated by Hillel Halkin
256 pages. Harcourt. $25.00.
Living in a city attacked month after month by suicide bombers has a way
of focusing one’s attention on the big questions. Or so you might think. In
practice, denial often trumps sober reflection, and in times of existential
stress many people deflect their attention into work, family, and routine.
As the owner of a large industrial bakery in Jerusalem, a deftly sketched
character in A Woman in Jerusalem, A.
B. Yehoshua’s novel of the recent Intifada years, discovers, months of
stressful living bring a spike in the consumption of comfort foods such as
bread and cakes. (The terrorism-induced recession also encourages the purchase
of bread in place of more expensive foods.)
If the denial response outlasts the danger, one might never come to consider
those existential issues raised by a threat to the life of a city or a nation.
When the month-long Gulf War ended on Purim in 1991, we Israelis left behind
the sealed rooms, traded gas masks for costume masks, and the next day resumed
our lives without fanfare or ceremony. Even the prolonged Palestinian terrorist
campaign that began in 2000 faded before our emotional defenses were so frayed
that many of us had to consider deeply what it meant that walking out our
doorways each morning was a choice to risk death. Jerusalem in 2000-2004
never became Sarajevo in the mid-1990s.
Single stories, real or invented, sometimes focus attention on vital questions
in ways the barrage of hourly news and daily papers cannot. In March 2002
Israelis were shocked and puzzled when only 16 of the 17 victims of a bus
bombing were identified by relatives or friends. Only nine months later was the
"17th victim” identified, a 35-year-old man from Tel Aviv, unemployed and
estranged from his family. Such anonymity was widely considered impossible
here. The identification jolted us into considering issues no one had
anticipated.
Yehoshua’s tightly constructed novel winds outward from a similar tale into
similarly unexpected realizations about our relationships with those closest to
us. A reporter for a Jerusalem weekly learns from the staff of a hospital
morgue that among the personal effects of a woman killed in a suicide bombing a
week before was a remnant from a pay slip from that mammoth bakery. He writes a
scathing exposé of industrial inhumanity, citing the bakery’s lack of attention
to the disappearance of a worker. The owner, leaked the story in advance by the
editor of the weekly, summons the head of his human resources division and
orders him to salvage the owner’s reputation by tracking down the dead woman’s
identity. The HR manager’s needs and commitments, along with those of several other
bakery employees, are instantly brushed aside by the owner’s desire to “rescue
his humanity,” while the owner himself indulges in an evening at the symphony.
The victim is a foreign worker from a former Soviet republic, divorced and
alone in Israel, whose manager had fired her but left her on the payroll. No
longer young, she had been blessed still with an intriguing beauty noticed by
all but the HR manager, who had interviewed her but now has no memory of that
encounter. He is soon assigned the task of seeing the journey through to its
end: repatriation, burial, compensation for the next of kin. The second half of
the novel is the recounting of that journey.
The HR manager is the title character in the original Hebrew edition of the
book, the title of which may be rendered The
Mission of the Director of Human Resources. His story is the core of the
novel. It is his attempts at constructing a new routine amidst the ruins of his
marriage that are thrown off course, his life that is altered by the book’s events.
The changes are mostly for the better. His detective work and his noble mission
catch the interest of his pre-teen daughter, who lives with her mother, a
resentful ex-wife from whom he has only recently separated. His own mother,
with whom he has gone to live, remains disappointed in him, but later he does
encounter a glimmer of appreciation from his ex-wife. His boss finds deeper
respect for the young manager’s ingenuity and integrity. He himself moves
beyond resentment at the burden he is asked to bear into pride in seeing the
dead woman finally laid to rest in the most appropriate place.
Yehoshua, a versatile and mature novelist whose works have evolved from early
surrealist stories to fully realized realist fiction, allows himself some
experimentation with form in this novel. First-person voices are heard from
time to time, in clusters of paragraphs set off in italics: night shift workers
at the bakery, the children of the dead woman’s neighbors, the staff of a
Jerusalem bar frequented at night by the lonely HR manager. These passages help
advance the plot, but they also furnish periodic reminders of the ways in which
our actions affect others, particularly those to whom we barely give a thought
and whose awareness of us is at the periphery of our own awareness—like the
dead guestworker herself.
And what of that awareness of ourselves? One might think that living through
the Intifada would help clarify to oneself just who one is. But random killing
is ultimately no source of meaning. The act of terror, or rather its motive,
its planning, and its execution, play no role in Yehoshua’s story, as they play
none in Israel’s self-image. It is, instead, the aftermath with which this book
deals. In the midst of the ever-renewed mourning and grieving of others,
Israelis went about their lives. As our protagonist—who is unnamed in this
book, in contrast to the dead woman, whose name we learn early on—moves across
the globe, his real progress is outward from the shell in which his secretary
says he has been living. The denial he most needed to break through was his own
denial of the vital importance of his closest family relationships. The human
resources he most needed to learn to appreciate were the resources within
himself.