The Lover

Adam, a Haifa garage owner, organizes an increasingly obsessive search for Gabriel, his wife Asya's former lover, who vanishes after being drafted following the 1973 Yom Kippur War and does not return home even once his unit is stood down. Yehoshua lets Adam's fixation read as displaced national anxiety as much as personal jealousy: after a war that caught the country dangerously unprepared, restoring one missing man to his expected place becomes a way of insisting the world can still be brought back under control.

Naim, a Palestinian teenager who works at Adam's garage and commutes in daily from a nearby village, is given full narrating chapters in his own first-person voice, a real formal risk for Hebrew fiction of 1977. Yehoshua neither romanticizes nor punishes Naim's growing attraction to Adam's daughter Dafi outright, letting his interiority, his frustration, his tenderness, his precarious footing as an Arab teenager inside a Jewish household, carry as much narrative authority as anyone else's chapters, which was itself the novel's real provocation.

Asya's grandmother Veducha, elderly and barely verbal, also receives her own sections, rendered in fragmented, associative language Yehoshua refuses to smooth into coherence. Setting a dying member of the pre-state Zionist generation beside a searching husband, a restless wife, and a lovesick Arab teenager gives the whole novel's crisis of national identity a formal shape: multiple, overlapping, mutually unintelligible voices sharing one house and one city without any of them fully understanding the others.

Yehoshua gives every narrator equal, unmediated access to the page and withholds any omniscient voice that might adjudicate between their competing versions of the same events. The reader is left to decide for themselves whose account of the search, the marriage, or the affair with Naim to trust, a democratic narrative structure that was itself read, on publication just years after a national trauma, as an argument about whose account of Israeli society deserved equal narrative weight.

Setting the novel's central workplace as an auto garage lets Yehoshua put Adam, Naim, and the war's material aftermath in the same room without contrivance: cars damaged in the fighting or simply run down by ordinary use pass through hands that belong to both the Jewish owner and his Arab employee, an economic dependency the two men rarely name directly but that structures nearly every scene between them. The garage becomes the one place in the novel where Jewish and Arab labor visibly interlock, which makes what eventually happens to Naim and Dafi's relationship land as a rupture of something already working, not merely a taboo being tested.