Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Israeli Space in Yehoshua’s Literary Works · 287
The name of this city, Jenin, reverberates with opposites. Janna means
Paradise, and Jinnie means demon.
Sakakin in Arabic is the plural of the word knife and is also the name of a
person in Islamic history, Khalil al-Sakakini (Sakakini means “knife-maker”).
On the motif of the lost Paradise, see H. Halperin, “The Deportation from
Paradise, the Right of Return, Liberty, and What Is between Them: Infrastruc-
ture Pattern in The Liberated Bride,” ̔Alei Siaḥ 47 (2002): 35–53 (Hebrew).
This cellar is also called “aggregating pot” and is the home of Rashad’s
sister, Rauda, who wants to return to her home in the Galilee.
Louis Ginzberg, “Adam and Eve in Paradise,” Legends of the Jews (Phila-
delphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), 1:69–71.
On the earthly and heavenly Paradise, see Hop, “A Look into the Sick
Root of Paradise.”
The theme of marriage to a creature who appears to be a woman but
is actually a she-demon has been used since the days of the Talmud and the
consolidation of the rabbinic literature. The Hebrew formulations of the story
evolved in the Orient and in the West and even developed into a novel, Ma ̔ase
Yerushalmi. See N. Abarbanel, Eve and Lillit (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University,
1994), 47–70 (Hebrew); C. Saranga and R. Sharaby, “Expression of Otherness in
the Works of A. B. Yehoshua,” Alpayim 34 (2009).
“A Jerusalem Tale,” in H. Pesach and E. Yasif, eds., The Knight, the De-
mon, and the Virgin (Jerusalem: Keter, 1998), 155–73 (Hebrew); M. Berdyczewski,
“The Ring,” Secrets and Legends (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1967): 282–83 (Hebrew); P.
Sadeh, “The Kiss” and “The Goldsmith and His Two Wives,” in The Book of the
Jews’ Imaginations (Tel-Aviv: Schocken, 1983), 64–66, 72–74 (Hebrew).
Shavit, “Yehoshua’s Passion,” 28.
See Saranga and Sharaby, “Expression of Otherness.”
In an interview, Yehoshua claimed that Jerusalem is too symbolic. Its level
is burdensome for him, and people such as Berl Katzenelson understood that it
had something that threatens the Zionist enterprise and they recoiled from it.
Golani, “The Conversation,” 190; Shavit, “Yehoshua’s Passion,” 26.
Shavit, “Yehoshua’s Passion.”
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, 1983); Eli-
ade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 367–82.
H. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–7.
