"The question of the Golah (Exile) is the most important and profound question a Jew must pose to himself when trying to probe the essence of the Jewish people." Whether that is true or not, it is central to the art and thought of the Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua. The quotation is not from the admirable novel under review ["A Late Divorce"] but from Mr. Yehoshua's polemic against the Diaspora, "Between Right and Right" (1981), which deserves more attention than it has received. In his fiction, Mr. Yehoshua is subtle, indirect and sometimes visionary, even phantasmagoric. His polemical essays are fierce, hyperbolic efforts to reformulate the terms of identity, Jew, Zionist, Israeli.

Reading "A Late Divorce" … persuades me that Mr. Yehoshua, though still only 47, has now integrated his art and his argument and joins himself, with this book, to what is strongest in contemporary Israeli literature—the poetry...