A.B. YEHOSHUA
THE LIBERATED BRIDE
tip
LIBERATE;
BRIDE
0
NCE AGAIN, THE Tedeschis-
I've heard of."
needing, so it seemed, the constant
"He wasn't just a teacher," Tedeschi protested angrily.
presence of real death—had a surprise corpse for him.
"He was a first-rate scholar who burned the midnight oil to under-
This time it was an unknown young scholar from the Arabic
stand the Arab mind. Not that that stopped them from snuffing him
Depai unent in Jerusalem, who, stimulated by a literary, sociological,
out one fine day."
and ethnographic interest, had undertaken a study of popular litera-
"Those aren't the same Arabs," Rivlin protested.
ture in North Africa. The translatoress, no mean student of Arabic
"Yes, they are, yes, they are!" bitterly declared Hannah Tedeschi,
literature herself, had helped her friend unravel the subtle historical
who generally avoided political arguments. "Don't be naive,
allusions hidden in the intricacies of contemporary Arab writing. And
Yochanan. Anyone who has burrowed through ancient Arabic poet-
ry as much as I have knows its all one world."
"NO ONE GIVES A DAMN
ABOUT
POPULAR CULTURE. THEY THINK IT'S
BENEATH THEM. THEY'D RATHER WRITE
"How can you let her say such a thing?" Rivlin scolded his
old professor.
Tedeschi waved him off. "Let her say what she wants. She
loved that young man. And rightly so, because he belonged to
that scholarly nobility that, far outside the limelight, does the
dirty work that clears the way for the rest of us, correcting old
ABOUT
THAT BLIND EGYPTIAN
errors and pointing out new directions."
"It was horrible," their hostess told the two sisters. "He was
WHO WON THE NOBEL PRIZE."
— FROM THE LIBERATED BRIDE BY A.B. YEHOSHUA
zines, and they were all spattered with blood. I cried when his
wife showed them to me—I, who have gone through hell with
he, an observant Jew intimately familiar with religious sources, had
Carlo and never shed a tear. What a loss to the world of scholarship.
repaid her with many an elegant rabbinic phrase that came in handy
And to think of what those sons of bitches in the department made
in her renditions of Jahaliya poetry. So productive had their collabo-
him go through to get a lecturer's rank!"
ration over the past year been that they had even toyed with the idea
"What was he doing on a bus? Didn't he own a car?"
of putting out a joint anthology of Arabic verse in Hebrew translation,
"What car? He gave his all to his work and barely made a living. If
he doing the moderns and she the ancients. And then he was killed.
it hadn't been for Carlo, who managed to arrange a small fellowship
"How?" Rivlin asked.
for him last year, he would have been on welfare. You should have
"In that bus bombing near Pisgat Ze'ev."
seen his apartment."
"That's the first university teacher killed by a terrorist that
6
carrying a briefcase full of rare Arabic newspapers and maga-
NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR JEWISH CULTURE
"What did you say his name was?"