Advance Warning

The Bleak Vision of The Liberating Bride

Abstract

The thematic association among the various narrative strands of A. B. Yehoshua’s The Liberating Bride involves a preoccupation with the early detection of signs of an impending breakdown of personal and communal relationships. This preoccupation is pursued by means of an extended analogy between the deep causes of conflict within the Rivlin family and the causes of conflict between Jews and Arabs within Israel and in the territories it occupies. The article focuses on the novel’s political perspective and argues that The Liberating Bride disputes the tendency to apply the postulates of post-modernist and post-colonial theory to the actualities of personal and political life in Israel. It resists the rejection of essentialist conceptions of national identity and suggests that, much like the Jews, all Arabs share a common cultural root that shapes their internal landscape and determines their relations with the outside world. A dangerously powerful tendril of this common root is the Palestinian conviction of their right to possess the entirety of the Land of Israel and an obsessive dedication of the Arabs on both sides of the Green Line to realizing the Right of Return.