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 … the spring of 1971, is structured along the lines of the French nouveau roman, blending reality and fantasy—the fall of a son and the father's wishful dream of his survival—with an abrogated sense of time. And "Missile Base 612," which appeared in … [1974], is a realistic but ironic work about ennui and futility in the life of an intellectual, both at home and at the front. The theme of war unites the three stories; but their particular chronology and varied modes of depiction and narration make the collection an interesting one indeed. (p. 76)

The dichotomous leadership [in "The Last Commander"] represents two diverse attitudes toward war and military achievement. [The commander] Yagnon—the name may be a pun on the Hebrew yagon, "sorrow" or "grief"—is the embodiment of indefatigable peacefulness, the antithesis of military action and efficiency. In contrast, the other commander symbolizes activity and accomplishment. He unfurls "the forgotten war flag," engages in constant war pep-talks, and plans even more demanding exercises.

The contraposition of two seven-day periods bespeaks a dialectical scheme of things, a symbolic, dichotomous world of two extreme gods, one of total rest-peace and one of total action-war…. The "last commander," The Great God War, comes out of the sky to rescue [the] people from their useless lethargy; but he is rebuffed, banished by Yagnon, himself a symbolic victim of warfare. The men lie about in "a sleepy, paralyzed camp," watching sporadically for the helicopter's return. The Israelis are caught in constant limbo, says Yehoshua, between these two ambivalent modes of existence. (p. 77)

[The main character of "Missile Base 612"] ultimately becomes merely a conglomerate facsimile of a number of social and psychological problems. Enmeshed as he is in … a web of implications, he embodies a pastiche of motifs already familiar from other works by Yehoshua … and by other authors as well (especially A. Megged and A. Oz). Yehoshua has attempted to delve into the dilemmas confronting Israelis today, but the overdone characterization makes more for melodrama than for cogency.

By far the best selection in the volume is the title story…. [One day, an old Bible teacher is] told that his son has been killed in the Jordan Valley.

What follows is a mixed series of episodes and flashbacks…. The ordering of these flashbacks and scenes is not fixed chronologically. At one and the same time the reader is thrust into the past and impelled through the present. The abrogated time scheme—probably modelled after the French novelist Claude Mauriac's technique of the "immobilization of time"—provides the structure which allows Yehoshua to blend real and imagined occurrences. This deft blending of time elements results in a magnificently wrought study of shock and bereavement. Confronting a questionable present, the reader is all the more willing to suspend his disbelief; he accepts even entirely implausible situations. (pp. 77-8)

In this technically dazzling work it soon becomes clear that the entire action of the story has taken place in the mind of the bereaved father. The "time of narration" seems to encompass several days; but the story's "narrated time" is only of a few minute's duration. Informed of his son's sudden death, the old teacher faints dead away. The rest of the story is composed of a kind of dream sequence or inner depiction of the father's mind and feelings as he copes with the awesome truth. The story is a tour de force in structure and psychological portraiture…. "Early in the Summer of 1970" stands as one of A. B. Yehoshua's finest achievements to date. (p. 78)