The Lure That Is Jerusalem : MR. MANI <i> By A. B. Yehoshua</i> , <i> Translated from Hebrew by Hillel Halkin</i> , <i> (Doubleday: $28; 366 pp.) </i>

In the 1840s, Mr. Mani is a Salonika merchant who impregnates his son’s childless widow in order to perpetuate his line. In 1982, Mr. Mani is a Jerusalem judge who tries to hang himself after his wife’s death. In the 1890s, Mr. Mani runs a Jerusalem birthing clinic, and throws himself under a locomotive out of hopeless passion for a young woman. In World War I, Mr. Mani spies for the Turks in Palestine and preaches to the bewildered Arab villagers that they must organize themselves to deal with the Jewish state that is to come. Today, Mr. Mani is a 7-year-old who lives on a kibbutz.

In A. B. Yehoshua’s strange and resonant novel, there are either seven or eight generations of Manis; allowing for a Talmudic doubt whether a man siring a son on his daughter-in-law marks one generation or two. “Mr. Mani” has the force of incantation. Its theme is Jerusalem, less as an actual city than as the locus of history’s desire and counterdesire; the wilderness watering-place to which the different species come in a perpetual common need and common estrangement.

Yehoshua tells the stories of the eight Manis, from Avraham in Salonika to Roni on the kibbutz, in five sections. Dealing in high-colored extremes, they are fashioned with precise complexity. The lives they recount pulse in zigzag slashes. They are the molten state of Jewish history; a history that erupted in the late 19th Century after centuries of quiescence, and began to flow gradually, with setbacks, uncertainties and contradiction, toward the Return.

Most brilliantly, Yehoshua suggests how the impulse to a Return could make itself felt to different Jews in different times and places. Only a few of the characters in “Mr. Mani” harbor a conscious Zionist ideology; and some who do--like one 19th-Century settler who believes it is to be achieved not by migration but by converting the Arabs to Judaism--get it wrong. For many in this richly imagined book, the call is no more than a sense of crisis in their own lives, like the oppressiveness that precedes a thunderstorm.

Yehoshua has chosen a charged means of telling his stories. Each section consists of a fractured dialogue; one character speaks, the other is mute. Yet as the speaker stops and shifts to reply to words we do not hear but infer, we get a picture of the silent one. Sometimes it is more vivid than that of the speaker.

This is a powerful device--Strindberg used it in “The Other”--but it has its dangers. It can force an artificial detail onto the speaker; he or she is compelled to say too much simply so that the reader can follow. And while the speaker moves through deepening and unexpected revelation, the silent partner is likely to remain static. In several of the dialogues, Yehoshua surmounts this difficulty. In others, he more or less succumbs to it, so that although they remain powerful as narration, they are dramatically flat. The mute characters are unable to fill the emotional space that their silence opens up for them.

The stories are told in reverse order. They begin with Hagar Shiloh, a Tel Aviv student whose lover, Efrayim Mani, asks her to go see his father in Jerusalem. Efrayim is on military duty; he has not heard from his father, recently widowed, and is worried about him. Hagar finds Gavriel Mani in a suicidal state; she stays and struggles with him until his despair passes. Later, she will bear her lover’s child, and although Efrayim has left her, Gavriel will reassert his hold on his life and lineage by taking up his role as grandfather.

The voices in this story make an incisive contrast. Hagar is a modern Israeli, skeptical and trusting by turns. The dark tumult of Gavriel, with its hints of a people’s millennial tragedy, is captured in the very difficulty she has telling her story. Her silent, skeptical auditor is her mother, who lives on a kibbutz. In Hagar’s angry defensiveness and her mother’s silence, we hear the generational struggle between the collective kibbutz ideology, and the stirrings of those who have broken away from it in a search for more private or personal values.

The second session takes us to Crete under the German occupation in World War II. It is an appalling story; so powerful as to verge on the unbearable. The narrator is a young German occupier; his silent interlocutor is his visiting mother, the proudly Prussian widow of a celebrated admiral. At first, we seem to be hearing the voice of a skeptic, pointing out to his indignant mother the prospect of a German defeat. Gradually, we see it as something else.

Egon, in fact, is a Nazi so pure and uncompromising that to him even Hitler is tainted. For him, the mission of the Aryans is to reclaim their roots in Greece, instead of soiling themselves with the barbarians in Russia and Britain. To avoid being sent with his division to the Russian front--Yehoshua has written a sickening portrait of someone who is at once a mad ideologue and a crass opportunist--he has joined the Gestapo, and participated in the elimination of the local Jewish population. Among the victims is an Efrayim Mani. Efrayim’s wife and little son--the Gavriel in the first section--managed to escape.

The third part takes place in Jerusalem in World War I, after the British have captured it from the Turks and their German advisers. The speaker is a young British lieutenant of Jewish extraction who is serving as a military prosecutor. His auditor is the judge, a battle-hardened, hideously wounded colonel. The next day they are to try a spy. Yosif Mani (Efrayim’s father) is a British subject as well as a Jew. As such, he must be condemned to death, since his guilt is unquestionable.

The nightlong talk between the lieutenant and the colonel is the most extraordinary passage in a book that is full of them. The lieutenant tells Yosif’s story; he is a quixotic prophet. The Balfour Declaration that established Palestine as a Jewish homeland, to be shared with the Arabs, had just been issued. The most idealistic of Zionists, Yosif foresees that his people--educated, skilled and fiercely motivated--will replace the notion of sharing with a hegemony that will corrupt their own nature. He has become a Turkish spy in order to travel in all parts of Palestine and preach his message to the Arabs: “Get an identity.”

The story is riveting. Equally riveting is what happens in the conversation. The lieutenant begins in servile fashion, stressing his Englishness to a man he is sure must be a conventional Tory anti-Semite. The colonel’s silences are made to speak; he is a Col. Blimp, it seems. Yet bit by bit, thrillingly, we see that he is something more. We are not sure what--that is part of the magic--but at the end we sense that not only has he responded to the story, but that he has devised an ingenious and healing way out.

After these three sections, each with its own incandescence, the last two are merely interesting. In the fourth, two wealthy European Jews, a brother and sister, attend the Third Zionist Congress in Basel under the leadership of Theodore Herzl, and then go on to visit Jerusalem. Their host is a charismatic local doctor, Moses Mani. He falls desperately in love with the sister, although he is married. And when she and her brother return home, he throws himself in front of a train and is cut in two. The dilemma that is beginning to face Jews--Israel or Europe--is stridently prefigured. The story is strong enough to take the stridency; but here, the one-sided dialogue--the brother speaks to his silent father back home--is flat and cumbersome.

The device is livelier, though not fully successful, in the final section. Avraham Mani, a Salonika merchant, tells of a visit to his son and daughter-in-law in Jerusalem in 1847. The younger Mani is another prophetic figure; he goes out to preach conversion to the Arabs. He is also impotent, and when he is mysteriously murdered, Avraham makes love to the widow. It is an act of lineal duty, in a way; but it is much darker than that.

Avraham tells his story to the dying Rabbi Haddaya, his revered teacher, and to the rabbi’s beautiful and much younger wife. Avraham had wanted to marry her and had been rebuffed. His son’s widow is her niece and resembles her. The story gleams with ripples of jealousy, revenge, incest and worse.

There are hints, in fact, of the late I. B. Singer’s erotic and metaphysical fireworks. Not at the expense of originality, however. Rather, as he goes back in time, Yehoshua has been able to shift tone and style so that we are literally transported, stage by stage, along the picaresque and dazzling pilgrimage of the Mani generations toward Jerusalem.