Book Club: A Journey to the End of the Millenium
with Professor Ranen Omer-Sherman
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Prof. Ranen Omer-Sherman will join the LBI Book Club in August to discuss the book A Journey to the End of the Millenium by A.B. Yehoshua.
About A Journey to the End of the Millenium: A Novel of the Middle Ages
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece. (Kirkus Review)
About the Author: A.B. Yehoshua
Avraham Gabriel "Boolie" Yehoshua (1936-2022) was an Israeli novelist, essayist, and playwright. Underlying themes in Yehoshua's work are Jewish identity, the tense relations with non-Jews, the conflict between the older and younger generations, and the clash between religion and politics. Learn more about this award-winning author here.
About Our Guest:
Ranen Omer-Sherman is The Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville. He is the author or editor of five books including Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature (2002), Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert(2006), The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (2008), Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2013), Imagining Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film (2015), and Amos Oz: The Legacy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond, as well as numerous essays on Jewish writers from Israel and North America. In addition, he serves as co-editor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. He was a founder of a desert kibbutz, served as a combat soldier in the IDF and worked for many years as a desert guide in the Sinai and Negev.
Finding the Book:
A Journey to the Millenium: A Novel of the Middle Ages can be found for sale in many if not most onsite book sellers. It can also be found in many libraries, if not in most library systems. We provide for you below some links to purchase the book:
