Yoram Kaniuk

Biography

In May 2011 Yoram Kaniuk petitioned the Israeli Interior Ministry to change the “religion” entry in his record from “Jewish” to “no religion”. The occasion was the birth of his grandson, who was registered as having no religion because the boy’s mother is not Jewish by halakha, Jewish religious law. On 27 September 2011 the Tel Aviv District Court granted the petition. Hundreds of Israelis said they wanted to do the same, and a new verb appeared in Hebrew, “lehitkaniuk”, “to Kaniuk oneself”.

By then Kaniuk had been a writer for half a century.

He was born on 2 May 1930 in Tel Aviv and grew up there. His father, Moshe Kaniuk, a native of Ternopil in Galicia, was the personal secretary of Meir Dizengoff, the city’s first mayor, and became the first director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His mother, who came from Odessa, was a teacher; her family had arrived in Palestine in 1909. He attended the Tichon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv and belonged to a youth movement, and in the autumn of 1947, at seventeen and a half, he left school and joined the Palmach, the strike force of the Jewish militia. He trained with its naval company at Caesarea. In the War of Independence he took part in several battles, among them Nebi Samuel, where his unit got into trouble on the road and the men were left without help. A week later came the battle for the Monastery of San Simon, and then the wound on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. These episodes later found their way into the story “Eagles” and the novel “1948”. When the Palmach was merged into the army in November 1948, Kaniuk became a soldier of the Israel Defense Forces. After he recovered he served on ships carrying Jewish refugees from Europe to Israel.

He studied painting and drawing at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, then for about a year in Paris, where, according to his biographers, Mordecai Ardon sent him. After that he signed on as a sailor and made his way to Canada and New York. He spent about ten years in the United States, working at art and taking odd jobs. In 1958 he met Miranda Baker, an American from a Christian family, married her and returned to Israel. It was in those years that he decided to devote himself to writing. From 1970 he lived for about ten years in Ramat HaSharon, and in 1980 he moved back to Tel Aviv.

His first book in Hebrew, the story collection “The Acrophile” (literally “The One Who Goes Down Up”), came out in 1963; it had previously been published in English. Then came “Himmo, King of Jerusalem” (1965), “Adam Resurrected” (“Adam, Son of a Dog” in Hebrew, 1968), “The Last Jew” (1982), “Commander of the Exodus” (1999), about Yossi Harel, the captain of the ship Exodus, “The Last Berliner” (2004) and “1948” (2010). Paul Schrader made a film of “Adam Resurrected” in 2009, and “Eagles” and the novella “Scums” were turned into the television drama “Scums” (“Nevelot”). He also wrote children’s books: for “The House Where the Cockroaches Live to a Ripe Old Age” he received the Ze’ev Prize. Under the pen name Yosef Sharara he published the novel “Confessions of a Good Arab” (1983).

His prose is mostly written in stream of consciousness, and the line between fiction, biography and autobiography in it is deliberately blurred. He received the President’s Award for Literature in 1998, the Bialik Prize in 1999, the Neuman Prize in 2006, the Sapir Prize for “1948” in 2011, and in 2012 he became an officer of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His books have been translated into about twenty languages. To my mind it is telling that until the twenty-first century the Israeli literary establishment accepted him only with difficulty.

He wrote for Haaretz, Davar, Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv. In 1981 he stood for the Knesset on the list of the Ratz party, and in 1996 he appeared on the Meretz list, far from any winnable place. He never gave up painting: the curator Gideon Ofrat wrote a separate essay on it.

Kaniuk died on 8 June 2013 in Tel Aviv. He left his body to science. In 2021 a street in Tel Aviv was named after him.