Friendly Fire

A long-married couple are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Daniella has flown from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of her older sister with her brother-in-law Yirmiyahu, a retired diplomat. In short parallel chapters, alternating between Africa and Israel, the story follows the busy husband Amotz, a designer of elevators, as he juggles the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, children, and grandchildren. Alongside unfolds the confrontation between his wife and her anguished seventy-year-old brother-in-law, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the West Bank by the "friendly fire" of his comrades. Now working as the manager of a team of African researchers digging from the bones of man's primate ancestors, Yirmiyahu desperately strives to detach himself from every shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.

With consummate artistry, A.B. Yehoshua has composed a rich, compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo one another in complex and surprising ways.