To live in Israel is to live with unremitting tension unremittingly; private life is intruded upon 24 hours a day by the real world in the form of hourly news broadcasts, which come into the home, the office, even the public buses.

Such is the psychological climate facing the Israeli writer, and no one has dealt with it so directly as Avraham B. Yehoshua….

The schoolteacher in the title story [of Early in the Summer of 1970] was to have retired in 1967. But three years later he is still working. At the time of his scheduled retirement, most of the younger teachers were called up to fight in the war. Now, in 1970, there is a different kind of war—a war of attrition. It brings fewer casualties, yet each day brings news of another death….

One day the [man] … goes off to teach and is informed that his son has...