The extra

Noga, a 42-year-old professional harpist and the headstrong, elliptical heroine of A. B. Yehoshua’s new novel, “The Extra,” doesn’t want children. Nine years earlier that refusal led to her divorce, and since then she has left Israel for a job with a Dutch orchestra and drifted into an amiable affair with a colleague. But after her father dies she returns to Jerusalem and faces the questions that loved ones and strangers just won’t stop asking. Is her childlessness a quirk, a stigma or an affliction — or does it perhaps offer her an opportunity to reset the course of her life? Yehoshua is one of Israel’s pre-­eminent novelists and, with his fellow writers Amos Oz and David Grossman, among the country’s most insistent voices pleading for engagement and peace with the Palestinians. Yehoshua often uses his fictional characters as test cases for political issues, and Noga is no exception. After all, fertility is a subject of political anxiety and religious injunctions in Israel. The memory of a million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust also weighs heavily on many couples planning a family. Add to that fears of a demographic imbalance fed by the high birthrate among Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, and it’s no wonder that women like Noga are on the defensive.