One of the most serious Israeli writers of the present generation … is A. B. Yehoshua, who is fortunately also a most competent storyteller. Yehoshua lacks as yet the epic range, but the remarkable gift displayed so far in his short fiction holds within it a brilliant promise. The title story in the present collection, "Three Days and a Child," reads at one level as though it had been written as a model for the delectation of structural analysts. It opens on a note of dilemma. The narrator, Dov, a research student in mathematics at the Hebrew University who has long loved a kibbutz girl but has failed to win her, cannot solve a quadrilateral equation on which his university thesis depends; and the story, constructed with a kind of mathematical precision, is in some way an attempt to solve the equation. It sets up a series of dialectical...