274 · Carmela Saranga and Rachel Sharaby
The Experience of Jerusalem Space
The main space in Yehoshua’s works is the space of the city of Jerusalem.
Already in the novel Three Days and a Child, Jerusalem is described as “a
hard city, sometimes very hard. Its modesty, its softness which is not soft-
ness, is not to be believed.”^16 According to Gurevits and Eran, Jerusalem
is like a small, jealous, violent, crude, and even crazy island.^17 The city is
not assimilated into Israeliness. In it the Israeli swings between Judaism,
which is not native, and nativity, which is not his.
Such also is Yehoshua’s Jerusalem. It is mentioned in The Lover (386),
where the hero is described as someone who “shakes from the intensity
of its harsh beauty,” although the city “appeared dirty, neglected.” And
in Mr. Mani, all roads lead to Jerusalem. In this novel of conversations,
the city is described in different periods. In the third conversation, which
occurred in Crete in 1918, a Jewish British soldier, Colonel Horowitz, de-
scribes the city to his commander: “The city itself, sir, is small and piti-
able... absolutely boring. The population is very heterogeneous, a great
mixture of small and closed communities, poverty and ignorance on the
one hand, and messianic arrogance on the other hand” (Mr. Mani, 152).
Descriptions that border on the grotesque and the delusional are
found alongside the realistic descriptions of the city. The space is de-
scribed as a demonic zone or a zone with a tendency toward demonism.
In the first conversation (1982), the woman Yael from kibbutz Mashabei
Sade describes Jerusalem as a freezing place where she feels she is sink-
ing. She refers to Emek Refaim (the valley of the ghosts) neighborhood
and claims that only those who live in Jerusalem do not mind living in a
neighborhood with such a name and compares them with those who live
in Tel-Aviv who would have rebelled against such a name (30).
In the fifth conversation, which took place in 1848, Avraham Mani
talks about his son Joseph, who was murdered in the alleys of the city,
and says, “This is what Joseph taught me, that everything connects in this
city and there are no barriers... and it is possible to go from one house
to another without going into the alley” (321). He describes the city as
having mazes and cellars, ascending and descending slopes that enable
going into and out of one world to another. Joseph melts borders and
develops a worldview that costs him his life. According to this world-
view, “there must be a connection between all people in Jerusalem” (325).
He decides to tell the “others”—the Muslims—that they are “Jews who