Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Israeli Space in Yehoshua’s Literary Works · 281
zones, such as “A Jerusalem Tale,” “The Ring,” “The Kiss,” and “The
Goldsmith and His Two Wives.”
45
In “The Kiss,” a man meets a demon in the forest who leads him into
a parallel world. There he is forced to marry a she-demon. When he is al-
lowed to return to his home, he is forced to promise to return at a particu-
lar time. When he does not fulfill this command, he is killed with a kiss by
the she-demon. In “The Goldsmith and His Two Wives,” demons live in
the cellar where a dead man is found. When the rabbis ask the demons to
vacate the house, they claim that their father was married to two women,
one human and the other a she-demon. When their she-demon mother
died, their father bequeathed the cellar of the house to them. According
to
this version, the two women lived under one roof.
In “The Ring,” an engaged lad is led to a castle by a demonic figure
and there is forced to marry another woman whom he only hears. Upon
his marriage, the woman and the castle disappear. This version opens
with the idea of the parallel worlds: “The kingdom of Satan is measure
for measure and scope for scope as the kingdom of man.” The essence of
these stories is in the journeys taken by the people. They find themselves
in a parallel land of demons, which leads them to their death or mutism.
They disappear into a place whose borders are unclear, which is a kind of
lost Paradise that turns out to be a demonic zone, or they live in a space
that serves as a Paradise with a lower compartment, and sometimes they
even bequeath it to their offspring.
Yehoshua’s novel
Facing the Forests contains motifs of the demono-
logical folk stories of the Middle Ages. Yehoshua refers to the demonic
space of the “other”—the “forest”—which comprises a microcosmos for
Israeli reality. The hero is a Jewish forest keeper who meets an old Arab
whose tongue has been cut out in the forest. The Arab wishes to expose
his Paradise, which is his lost village, under the covered space of the
forest. The fire that will be kindled in the forest is inevitable, and in an
absurd manner the Arab gets the idea for setting the fire from the Jew.
There is a three-walled house in the forest, exposed to the landscape and
to the space. There is no clear inside and outside, only what is on the
surface and what is hidden underneath.
In
Facing the Forests, a Jew also finds himself in a forest, where he meets
an Arab whom he perceives as a demon. The laws are broken in the forest
when he is joined by a woman with whom he has relations characteristic
of relations with a she-demon. This woman is described as someone who
282 · Carmela
Saranga and Rachel Sharaby
turns into a “shadow” in the darkness and “the forest bewitches her”
(119). Contrary to the demonological stories, in which the man leaves
the land of the demons and the forest and returns to his home, it is the
woman who abandons the forest and enters the world outside the forest.
Similarly to the demonological stories, the Arab in this story accompanies
the hero into the land of the demons. However, the situation can also be
viewed the other way around, with the figure of the demon being inter-
changed between the Jew and the Arab.
Yehoshua claims that “we have a tendency to drive the non-Jews crazy.
By delving deep into the identities of other peoples, we threaten them.
. . . Our lack of clarity and our invasiveness scare
them and lead to these
sick interactions between us and them.”
46
In Yehoshua’s works, space is
divided into areas in which the figures move in and out of their circles
or up and down in forced journeys from the focus to a delusional space
and cross borders. They search for the areas of pain above and below the
surface, and at the end of the process they discharge themselves or are
discharged out of the circle against their will.
In
A Journey to the End of the Millennium, Yehoshua integrated the figure
of an Arab partner, Abu Lutfi, into the story’s web. Abu Lufti leads his
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