B. Abraham Yehoshua

Eyal, Yirmy’s son, was killed during his military service by his own comrades, who mistook him for a wanted Palestinian. Amotz, Yirmy’s brother-in-law, in breaking the news of his son’s death, inadvertently uses a cruel term: Eyal was killed by friendly fire. This is the premise of the narrative, which gets underway from the moment Daniela, Yirmy’s sister-in-law, departs for Africa, where her brother-in-law has sought refuge and where her sister died. From this point onward, the novel unfolds along two parallel trajectories: Daniela’s journey to Africa and the life of Amotz, alone, in Israel. Daniela wants to know where her sister died, and in some way she is undertaking a journey of liberation from grief and death. Yet she also wants to understand why her brother-in-law, now in his seventies, chooses to live in Africa. The landscape, the animals, and the people form the backdrop of an ongoing dialogue between Daniela and Yirmy, in which familial themes (the sister, Yirmy’s quest to uncover the true circumstances of his son’s death) overlap with broader issues linked to the condition of Israel and the peculiarities of a religion—Judaism—so unyielding and severe. If it is possible to come to terms with the death of one’s loved ones, it is far more difficult to serenely overcome the existential anguish of an entire people. And so, the only recourse is flight to a distant continent: I came, Yirmy says, > to take a break from my people, from Jews in general and from Israelis in particular “everything that oppresses me slips away without philosophies and arguments.” Meanwhile Amotz, head of an engineering design firm, must find a solution to strange noises emanating from the elevator shaft of an apartment building: is it a technical issue, or is there something mysterious, unfathomable, arising from a country blithely living on the edge of a precipice? *Friendly Fire* addresses many themes, perhaps too many: death, family, religion, the destiny of a people, flight from it all. The underlying thread is the notion that the true threat comes not from without (for instance, from the Palestinians), but from within—from a people, the Jews, who have always wandered without ever wishing to integrate with others. The book does not intend to be an indictment of Israel, even if the passages concerning the Bible are undeniably critical; rather, it constitutes an expression of profound existential suffering. The Israeli people today are like that elephant paraded around as an attraction because of its gigantic eye. > Daniela feels her heart ache at the sight of its suffering, as though it were a relative. And in that iris flecked with blue, yellow, and green looking at her with sadness, a drop gathers that gradually turns into a tear, followed by another, and the weeping of that mute, and perhaps even grateful, animal shakes Daniela to the core, as if in that moment the desire that brought her to Africa during the festival of Hanukkah were finally fulfilled . *Friendly Fire* expresses the suffering of a people and its inability to break free from its condition. The flaw of the book, however, is that the theme unfolds sluggishly, almost smothered by words that seem to serve only to conceal and dissipate it. The phrasing is pleasant, but the sluggishness, the lack of narrative drive, and the monotonous reliance on the device of parallel plots are all factors that render the book verbose and tedious. Why not read it? It is a rambling, ponderous tale despite the author’s seasoned skill. The reader gets lost in an infinity of words.

The novel revolves around the affairs of the human resources manager of a large company. An employee is killed in a terrorist attack, and the personnel director is tasked with overseeing the identification of the body and its transport to her native land: a nation of the former Soviet Union. Thus begins a journey that constitutes, in some sense, a path of purification and at the same time an escape from a state of war, such as the one in which Israel finds itself. The protagonist undergoes a rebirth from an existential condition—both private and collective—of uncertainty and anxiety: confidence in life and in one's own abilities is regained. As usual, the novel is very well written, but it is exceedingly weak in terms of content and narrative pacing, so much so that it proves tedious and insipid.