Mr. Mani

Summary

Five voices speak across two centuries of Sephardic history, unravelling a family's destiny backward through time.

Mr. Mani is a deeply affecting six-generation family saga, extending from nineteenth century Greece and Poland to British-occupied Palestine to German-occupied Crete and ultimately to modern Israel.

The book opens in a Negev kibbutz in 1982, where a young student recounts her visit to a despondent Jerusalem judge. The narrative moves through time and is told in five conversations about the Mani family.

A. B. Yehoshua records each conversation through only one speaker, leaving the second voice unprinted and unheard. This reverse chronicle travels backward across generations, visiting German paratroopers in Crete, a British court-martial in 1918, and an ill-fated journey from Galicia.

It ends in Athens in 1848 with Avraham Mani's powerful tale about the death of his young son in Jerusalem.

A profoundly human novel, rich in drama, irony, and wit.

• Unconventional Narrative Structure: The five dialogues record only one partner's speech, leaving the listener's half to be deduced from the reactions of kibbutz mothers, German grandmothers, and paralyzed rabbis.
• Father-Son Relationships: From a despondent magistrate in modern Jerusalem to an eccentric obstetrician in nineteenth-century Abraham's Vineyard, each generation confronts the burden of inherited paternal obsessions.
• Middle Eastern Literature: Shifting rulers across the Levant mark the Mani family's journey, traversing Ottoman alleyways, British military tribunals in the Russian Compound, and the ancient stone terraces of Silwan.
• Also by This Author: The Tunnel, A Woman in Jerusalem and The Extra.