The career of A.B. Yehoshua, Israeli novelist, playwright, literary theorist and cultural critic, has spanned nearly the entire duration of the statehood of Israel and has developed along with the state. On April 11, Professor Yehoshua gave a talk at the Whitney Humanities Center titled, "From Mythology to History: A Journey to the End of the Millenium," in which he spoke about his novel A Journey to the End of the Millenium, which examines the clash that occurred between Jews from the Muslim East and Jews from the Christian West in Spain at the end of the first millenium. Mr. Yehoshua's novels other novels available in English translation include The Lover, A Late Divorce, Open Heart, and his most renowned, Mr. Mani.

Prof. Yehoshua spoke with Rebecca Honig after the talk.

Israeli literature has been focused mostly on the present. Do you see that changing at all, besides in your own work?

I see in the last year there was a going backwards, not to a historical period, but to families. Trying to understand families through let's say 40, 60, 70 years; a family saga. It's a kind of historical fiction, not really dealing with the power of history, but with more relevant history, going to the family.

But isn't the history of Israel as a state only that old?

Yes, but we're as old as a people, we are an old people. We are going and fighting about old places, my son had to go with to the army and preserve a place, a tomb, that was existing 3,000 years ago. We are living the Holocaust, the 9th century, we are still burdened by our history. On one hand we are very young, we have to deal with our recent history, and on the other hand we are loaded with myth and a long history with which we have to struggle, so that's the reason why things are so complicated.

Why is history so important?

We are struggling between two codes, of history and mythology ... You can change history but you cannot change mythology... History may contain myths, but it is always under control, under inspection, being researched, and you always have the right to say to your fellow historian 'What you wrote is not correct because I found a document that says otherwise.' I hope very much that the trend of history will win. My feeling is it has to be directed to the historian-European model that is more fitted to an authentic ethnic people like we are, but this is the great debate, and if the promise of the United States is to come and try to build something with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and try to bring peace, this will be the great moment, the great conflict, between mythology and history, and this will come, I hope, to some sort of civil war, but I hope very much it will not be a real civil war.

You seem to place a great importance on the power that literature can have to reconstruct history and to teach morality.

I think that literature can play a part in what we call reconstructing the past, to reconstruct history, to present it to the people. A lot of people are connected through art to their history...but unfortunately Israeli literature doesn't do it enough. And I hope that a book like mine, and others, will help to do it.

You talk a lot about the tension between East and West in Israeli society and Jewish culture. How do you see that in Israeli literature? Can literature reconcile that tension?

It's reconciling, in a certain way, but it's also opening, at the same time. It's opened the wounds, it's opened the conflicts...dealing with them, so in a certain way this is going together. The question of East and West is a vital debate, like the religious and secular are vital questions in Israel. But where I see a solution to the tension between East and West I don't see a solution between the religious and the secular. This is really a problem.

Can different cultures co-exist peacefully?