Host Marcela Sulak today reads from A. B. Yehoshua’s novel A Journey to the End of the Millennium. Set in the year 999, it follows a Jewish merchant from Tangiers on his annual voyage to Europe to secure and expand his trade:

“And so in these twilight days, as faiths were sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next, it was preferable to restrict encounters with adherents of another faith and to be content, at least for the greater part of the way, to travel by sea, for the sea, which can reveal itself at times to be capricious and cruel, owes no obligation to what is beyond its reach.”

Avraham Yehoshua was born in 1936 into a fifth generation Jerusalem family of Sephardic origin. The New York Times calls him “The Israeli Faulkner.”

Text:
A Journey to the End of the Millennium – A Novel of the Middle Ages. By A. B. Yehoshua. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Harvest Book. Harcourt, Inc., 1998.

Further reading by A. B. Yehoshua:
The Lover. Garden City N.Y., Doubleday, 1978 (translated by Philip Simpson). Dutton, 1985. Harvest/HBJ, 1993.
A Late Divorce. London, Harvill Press, 1984. San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Five Seasons. New York, Doubleday, 1989.
Mr. Mani. New York, Doubleday, 1992.
Open Heart. Garden City N.Y., Doubleday, 1995.
The Liberated Bride. London, Peter Halban, 2003.
A Woman in Jerusalem. London, Halban Publishers, 2006, 2011.
Friendly Fire: A Duet. London, Halban Publishers, 2008.
The Retrospective. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Music:
Los Tiempos Pasados – Una Matica De Ruda
La Roza Enflorese – La Roza Enflorese

Producer: Laragh Widdess
Technical producer: Alex Benish