Review: "The Only Daughter" by A.B. Yehoshua

The Only Daughter by A.B. Yehoshua
Translated by Stuart Schoffman
English translation published April 2023 via HarperVia
★★★

Rachele is eleven, almost twelve, with a precocious intelligence and a certain naïveté. In Padua, where she lives, her family are oddities of a sort, Jews in a Catholic country. But Rachele is not quite in a place, yet, to worry about the differences in the beliefs of different religions—her concern is more that her non-Jewish grandmother might be hurt by a Hebrew prayer that puts Jews first. With her father unwell (growing an appendage, as Rachele understands it), Rachele seeks to better understand her place in the world in this character-driven book.

Religion and family are the thickest of themes throughout the book, though neither of them is treated too heavily—every character treats their religion, whether Jewish or Christian or atheist, slightly differently; Rachele loves her family with the uncomplicated passion of a child, and is forced for the first time to consider that her parents might not be invincible, but if I had to pick a singular thing to answer the question of "what is this book about," I wouldn't say illness or religion but rather a girl on the cusp of growing up.

I'm very curious about the inspiration for this novel—Yehoshua was Israeli and lived almost his entire life in Israel; as far as I can tell neither he nor his family ever lived in Italy. It's hard to know what to make, then, of this story of a girl, in so many skins that the did not wear—religious outsider, girl, Italian. (Especially curious to me when Yehoshua wrote and spoke so passionately about his Israeli identity.) It would be interesting to see what a female author might do with this same subject—some parts of this book (e.g., a priest's treated-as-well-intentioned wish that a pretty, lively eleven-year-old were ten years older so that he might marry her) could only have been written by a man, and...I suppose I'd like to hear from a woman who was once eleven and Jewish in Italy what that was like for her.

It's been so interesting to delve a bit more into translated fiction this year—such different styles! Hard to know how much of that is cultural and how much is just a given author's styles...I suppose I'll have to keep reading more books by more people from far-flung places to gather more data.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.