Friendly Fire, the latest novel by the renowned Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, takes place during Chanukah. As the candles are lit on each successive night of the holiday, a family struggles to come to terms with the deaths that have torn them apart.

Daniela, an aging schoolteacher, is away from her husband for the holiday week, visiting her brother-in-law Yirmiyahu, who manages the work of a group of researchers digging for primate bones in Africa. Scattered and dreamy since the recent death of Shuli – Yirmiyahu’s wife and her beloved sister – Daniela is unaccustomed to being apart from her husband, a Tel Aviv elevator engineer who is equally ambivalent about their week-long separation.

The novel’s narrative shifts between Daniela’s visit to Tanzania and the family she leaves behind in Israel, a structure that Yehoshua uses to great effect. If at times the pacing slows as a result of this back and forth, it is ultimately well worth it, due to the numerous connections forged between the two disparate worlds of Africa and Israel. In both sections of the book, the places and people come alive with rich, languid detail; suspense is created less from the action of the novel than from the riveting emotion packed into nearly every scene.

In Tanzania, Daniela is eager to recall Shuli’s life, to “help her revive the pain that has dulled over the past year.” She quickly discovers that her brother-in-law is willing to talk about Shuli but will hear no news of Israel – not even the name of the current prime minister – wanting a rest from “the whole messy stew, Jewish and Israeli.”

The source of Yirmiyahu’s rage, and the epicenter of the book, is not the loss of Shuli but the death of their son Eyal years before by “friendly fire" – a term that enrages him yet which he seizes upon, because he “also understood that inside this stupid oxymoron, this friendly fire, there was something more, some small spark of light that would help me navigate through the great darkness that awaited me and better identify the true sickness that afflicts all of us.”
Not even Daniela, who was always close to Shuli, has previously understood the depths of Yirmiyahu’s rage, nor the degree to which it has estranged all of them from one another and even from themselves. When she presses Yirmiyahu to explain his insistence on remaining in Africa, he erupts with fury about his desire to separate from all traces of Israel and Jewishness:

Here there are no ancient graves and no floor tiles from a destroyed synagogue; no museum with a fragment of a burnt Torah; no testimonies about pogroms and the Holocaust. There’s no exile here, no Diaspora. There was no Golden Age here, no community that contributed to global culture. They don’t fuss about assimilation or extinction, self-hatred or pride, uniqueness or chosenness.…No one feels compelled to decide if he is a Jew or an Israeli or maybe a Caannite, or if the state is more democratic or Jewish, if there’s hope for it or if it’s done for. The people around me are free and clear of that whole exhausting and confusing tangle.

Among the most riveting scenes in the book are those in which Daniela probes deeper into Yirmiyahu’s psychic wound. Unsatisfied with the army’s explanation of Eyal’s death, Yirmiyahu reveals that he has pursued his personal investigation and discovered that his son was accidentally shot by a member of his own unit because of a well-meaning, human gesture made to the Palestinian family on whose roof he was stationed, in ambush. Hearing the story from a member of that Palestinian family, Yirmiyahu had hoped for sympathy and instead received only furious hatred, but in this he eventually finds some measure of mangled comfort. Yirmiyahu’s rage at his country, at his self, and ultimately at the inescapability of being who he is, is so palpable as to feel flammable to the reader; in Yirmiyahu’s monologues, Yehoshua captures the searing intensity of his pain and presents a bleak vision of what it means to be a Jew and an Israeli.

Meanwhile, in a version of Israel that, despite Yirmiyahu’s dire vision, is very much alive and bustling with concerns both large and small, Daniela’s husband Amotz is tending to family members each beset by their own needs. Their daughter Nofar, who keeps her distance and who, in the words of her mother, “is probably boycotting all lights of happiness till she exhausts the grief in her heart,” is cajoled to join her father to light Chanukah candles. Meanwhile, their son Moran has been reprimanded and imprisoned for evading his army reserve duties, leaving his beautiful, troubled wife Efrat to care for their two demanding children alone.

While tending to his family, Amotz is also mystified by a problem at work. An unidentified howling is heard in an elevator shaft he designed, in a modern Tel Aviv building. The complaint is shared by all residents of the building but felt most acutely by a bereaved father whose son was recently killed in action. As if Amotz doesn’t have enough on his hands, he is also asked to help his own infirm father who is caught between a noble desire to fulfill a promise to an old lover and a wish to maintain his dignity in her eyes. Together with a team of Filipino workers, Amotz manages to take apart the small elevator that his father secretly built for his lover years before and locate the source of another equally strange and inexplicable wailing sound.

In Yehoshua’s hands, even a pair of broken elevators becomes a means of meditating on larger familial and national predicaments. “I learned long ago that a machine is like a human body. You open it up and start poking around, you discover things you’d rather not know,” says a colleague of Amotz. Friendly Fire is full of such resonant moments. Yehoshua writes in empathic detail of his characters’ inner lives; at the same time, he is writing more broadly of a people and country in pain. To read this novel is to feel that you understand the current political and emotional climate a little more fully, for you have been ushered into what it means to be an Israeli in the world.

Yet for all the existential despair, Yehoshua also simultaneously brings to life another version of Israel in which there are deep, noble connections between the various characters; there are human, touching possibilities for rekindling frayed connections. The love present in the novel might often feel oppressive and dark, yet it is love nonetheless. Even in the troubled marriage between Moran and Efrat, there are striking moments of consolation. As Daniela says in another context: “At the heart of family animosities there is a warm intimacy that does not exist among warring strangers.”

Friendly Fire burns with rage and pain but also conveys a profound sense of humanity and compassion. Even amid the deaths that haunt the novel, there is much love and life.