Ephraim Kishon

Biography

When Ferenc Hoffmann stepped ashore at Haifa in 1949 and gave his name, the clerk, by his own account, told him there was no such name and wrote him down as Ephraim. He shortened the surname Kishont to Kishon. The new name, by the same account, was taken from a river near Mount Carmel.

He was born on 23 August 1924 in Budapest, the son of a bank manager; some sources give his birthday as 24 August. In 1940 he won a school competition for the best novella. Anti-Jewish laws closed the university to him, and he trained as a goldsmith. In 1944 he was sent to the labour camp at Jolsva (now Jelšava in Slovakia). There he played chess with the commandant and, in his own words, played well enough to stay alive but not so well as to provoke his anger. How he got away afterwards is told differently in different sources: by some accounts he escaped from the camp and hid in Budapest, by others he escaped on the way to an extermination camp and lived in Slovakia under a false name. Of his large family, his parents and a sister survived.

After the war he finished a course in art history and sculpture and published humorous pieces under the name Ferenc Kishont, among others in the satirical magazine Ludas Matyi. In May 1949, with his first wife, Chawa Klamer, he left for Israel, escaping the Communist regime.

At first he lived in the Sha’ar HaAliyah transit camp near Haifa, then on Kibbutz Kfar HaHoresh, where he worked as an orderly. He learned Hebrew at night by copying out a dictionary by hand. A heavy Hungarian accent stayed with him for life. His first pieces were written in Hungarian for the newspaper Új Kelet.

In 1951 a satirical column appeared in the newspaper Omer, and then in Davar, where he published “Legend of a Tel Aviv Canal”, later the basis of the film Blaumilch Canal. The same year his first book came out, “The Pestering Immigrant”, about the life of new arrivals. In 1952 he began the column “Chad Gadya” (“One Little Goat” in Aramaic, from the Passover song) in Maariv and kept it up for about thirty years, almost daily for the first two decades. His play “His Name Precedes Him” was staged at the Habima Theatre in 1953. Later came “The Marriage Contract”, “Oh, Juliet!” (“Es war die Lerche” in German) and other plays; “Oh, Juliet!” was performed in dozens of countries.

He turned to film in the 1960s. Sallah Shabati (1964), with Chaim Topol in the title role, about an immigrant from an eastern country, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won a Golden Globe. Then came Ervinka (1967), Blaumilch Canal (1969), The Policeman (1971), also an Oscar nominee and a Golden Globe winner, and The Fox in the Chicken Coop (1978), about a party functionary who tears a village apart with politics. The last film failed, and that was the end of his cinema; Kishon said it was not the film that had failed but the audience.

He was read very differently in different places. In Israel critics condescendingly called his humour “middlebrow”, and he himself complained of neglect by the literary establishment. In West Germany and Austria his books stayed on bestseller lists for years; many stories were translated into German by Friedrich Torberg, who did not know Hebrew and worked from an English text. Later Kishon translated himself. From 1981 he had a house in Appenzell, in Switzerland. He gave up the column in Maariv at the end of the 1970s. I would say that it is here that the difference between his fame at home and abroad shows most sharply.

In 1990 he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 1998 the Bialik Prize, and in 2002 the Israel Prize for his contribution to the life of the country. His other awards include the Nordau Prize (1953), the Sokolov Prize for journalism (1958) and the David’s Harp Prize (1964). He loved chess, and in 1990 German companies produced the Kishon Chesster, a chess computer that made his witty remarks during a game.

Ephraim Kishon died on 29 January 2005 at his home in Appenzell. His coffin was flown to Israel and on 1 February he was buried in the old cemetery on Trumpeldor Street in Tel Aviv, beside the grave of his second wife, Sara.