A. B. Yehoshua

He married Rivka, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, in 1960. He credits his wife for his profound psychological perceptiveness, a quality that enables him to create fictional characters with intense personalities.

He is the proud father of a daughter and two sons, and is also the grandfather of six.

He was born on December 19, 1936 into a fifth-generation Jerusalem family. His father, Yaakov Yehoshua was a scholar and a historian who also wrote books about the Sephardic community of Israel from which the family hailed. His mother, Malka Rosilio, was the daughter of a wealthy Moroccan businessman who had settled in Jerusalem during the 1930s. He has one sister.

Yehoshua served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army from 1954 to 1957.

He received his formal education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he studied literature and philosophy.

He began writing during 1957–58 and published his first book of stories, ‘The Death of the Old Man’ in 1962. Soon he became popular and was counted among the “new wave” generation of Israeli writers whose works differed considerably from those of earlier writers.

As a “new wave” writer, his works focused more on the individual and interpersonal rather than the group. From an early age he was influenced by writers like Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon.

He embarked on a teaching career in Jerusalem before moving to Paris in 1963. There he continued teaching and also served as the General Secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students.

He remained in Paris for four years and returned to Israel in 1967. He served as a paratrooper during the Six Day War.

In 1972, he started teaching Comparative and Hebrew Literature at the University of Haifa eventually becoming a full professor. He became a writer-in-residence at St. Cross College, Oxford in 1975, and has since been a visiting professor at several international universities including Harvard and the University of Chicago.

His novel, ‘Mr. Mani’, a profound story about six generations of the Manis, a Jewish family living in the Middle East, is probably his most acclaimed novel. The book is richly textured and explores the various tragedies that have haunted the Manis through the past several decades.