In his fifteen-odd years of prose writing, Avraham B. Yehoshua has moved through three distinct phases. His first stories were brief, allegorical narratives, absurdist in tone and dramatization, and existential in import. Later, in the mid-sixties, he wrote longer stories, more psychologically focused and realistically framed, but still dependent upon strong doses of interpretation. And in the seventies, especially with his most recent Hebrew publication, The Lover (haMe'ahev), Yehoshua has turned still further away from symbolism. Instead, his works have become rooted unambiguously in one, all-encompassing reality: war and its accompanying stresses on the human psyche.

The three stories collected in Early in the Summer of 1970 span the three stages of A. B. Yehoshua's writing career…. "The Last Commander," collected in Yehoshua's first volume of stories (The Death of the Old Man, 1963), is a heavily symbolic work with socio-psychological implications. "Early in the Summer of 1970," first published in...