Price  £12.99
Format  Paperback & ebook
Published  27 February 2020
Length  336 pages
ISBN  9781912600038
ISBN  9781912600045 (ebook)
 

Reviews

Kirkus June, 2020

Haaretz, July 2020

New York Times, August 2020

The Arts Fuse, August 2020

Jewish Book Council, September 2020

Jewish News of Northern California, September 2020

Tablet, November 2020

Jewish Review of Books, January 2021

The Jerusalem Report, February 2021

Fathom, February 2021

Interviews

The Jewish Chronicle March, 2020

Jewish Book Week livestream interview, April 2020

Interview in Yediot Aharonot with Yuval Plotkin,  April 2020

The Times of Israel, May 2020

i24 News, January 2021

Blog Reviews

Left on the Shelf June, 2020

Shelf Awareness July, 2020

The Tunnel by A.B. Yehoshua

Translated from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman

Yehoshua weaves a masterful story about a long and loving marriage, interlaced with biting social commentary and caustic humour.

Zvi Luria has begun to lose his memory. At the beginning he only makes small mistakes, forgetting first names and taking home the wrong child from his grandson’s kindergarten, but he knows that things will only get worse.

He’s 73 and a retired road engineer. His neurologist hints at the path his illness might take and suggests ways of combatting it, with the help of his wife Dina.

Dina, a respected paediatrician, is keen for him to return to meaningful activity, and suggests he volunteers to work with his old colleagues at the Israel Roads Authority. This is how Luria finds himself at the Ramon Crater in the Negev desert planning a secret road for the army with the son of his former colleague. But there’s a mystery about a certain hill on the route of this road. Who are the people living there and why are they trapped? And should the hill be flattened and the family evicted, or should a tunnel beneath it be built?

With humour and great tenderness, A.B. Yehoshua depicts the love between Luria and his wife as they confront the challenges of his illness. Just when Luria’s sense of identity becomes more compromised, then does he find himself on this extraordinary adventure involving people even more vulnerable than himself, enabling a rich meditation on the entwined identities of Israeli Jews and Palestinians and on the nature of memory itself.

Stuart Schoffman discusses his translation of The Tunnel

A.B. Yehoshua

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, A.B. Yehoshua was the author of twelve novels, a collection of short stories, and several plays and volumes of essays. He has won prizes worldwide and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and adapted for film and opera. An outspoken critic of both Israeli and Palestinian policies, he continued to speak about and search for solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Yehoshua died in June 2022, aged 85.

Visit our Remembering A.B. Yehoshua page to read some of the countless tributes and obituaries that have been written to celebrate Yehoshua’s incredible life and career.

About Stuart Schoffman

Stuart Schoffman was a writer, translator, educator, historian, screenwriter, humourist, a shrewd observer of people and a fount of knowledge which we joyfully shared for many years. Stuart died in November 2021 after battling a serious illness. He enriched our lives personally and professionally and we shall miss him deeply

"The Tunnel - translated smoothly from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman - is about how one couple copes with the initial news that from now on, everything is going to be different . . . Zvi comes to see, in large measure because of his struggle with dementia, that to exist among people, all people, is to open oneself to the menace but also the glory of human entanglement . . . I found great beauty, not answers, in Zvi's essential human decency. Rather than retreat inward and hide, he chooses - yes - to live."
Peter Orner, New York Times Book Review

"Exuberant is the right word, not only for the story's pile up of characters and events, but also for its prose. It has such precision and joy that I would be remiss if I didn't praise the translator, Stuart Schoffman...[This is] a novel so intimate and vivid that past and present and future merge in ways that generate surprise and delight."
The Arts Fuse

“The Tunnel [is] one of [Yehoshua’s] finest achievements . . . sharp, carefully sculpted, fully controlled by the sure hand of an expert artist.”

Dan Miron, Haaretz

“A quirky, deeply affecting work by a master storyteller.”

Kirkus, 1 June 2020

Listed in the New York Times ‘100 Notable Books of 2020’

American Nation Jewish Book Award Finalist, 2020

Instagram Reviews

bookstheuniverseandeverything

Review by Kevin: Thanks to @halban_publishers (and @hebdo_readings readings for the recommending us to them!) for the opportunity to read A.B. Yehoshua’s ‘The Tunnel’. It tells the story of Zvi Luria, a retired and respected director and road engineer for the Israel Roads Authority who is 75 and navigating his later years. We join him as he receives results of a scan that show the slow onset of dementia. Together with his wife, a paedeatrician, he is keen to delay the effects of the atrophy and be proactive in keeping his brain busy.

Although the book isn’t solely about dementia, we are witness to its growing and poignant effect on Luria (namely the forgetting of his address, the first names of people he has known for many years and mistakenly taking home the wrong child from his grandson’s kindergarten.) It is also a study of a family dealing with change and the way love adapts as people grow old together.

In parallel to the familial change, cultural change and adaptation is another strong theme in the book. In his quest to slow the atrophy, Luria finds part-time work helping a young associate from his former job. The work is the planning of a secret army road, which is set to be built across a piece of land where a nomadic Palestinian family live. It is a narrative vehicle that allows Yehoshua to explore the complicated interrelations of Israeli and Palestinian Jews as Luria learns how the divisions and segregations are not so black and white.

A slow burner but a good read, The Tunnel was a portal to a part of the world I haven’t read much literature from (always a bonus). I found the subject of dementia interesting and well handled in the light humorous style the author used to describe it. At an age myself where certain facts and memories come to me a little less easily, I was reminded of one of my favourite poems by the American ex poet laureate Billy Collins, which I include below. The losing of one's mind is a subtly terrifying fate and Yehoshua artfully puts into words the tensions, trivialities and helplessness it brings.