Friendly Fire: A Duet - Abraham B. Yehoshua

Nobody writes about the unique intimacy of a loving marriage the way the Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua does. Maybe the subject works in his fiction because sweet domesticity is less cloying against a backdrop of history rife with life-and-death events. In Friendly Fire (Harcourt, $26), Daniella has left her loving husband Amotz at home in Israel while she visits her brother-in-law Yirmiyahu to mourn her sister’s death. Yirmi is acting as the financial manager for an all-African anthropological team in northern Tanzania. The book alternates between Daniella in Africa and Amotz, who deals with his octogenarian father and the grandchildren. “Friendly fire” is what killed her sister’s son, and Yehoshua probes the sorrow of the incident and the corrosive effect it had on the parents’ marriage. Perhaps “friendly fire” also refers to the Hanukkah candles, since the action takes place during the eight days of Hanukkah.