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Yoram Kaniuk

Discussion in 'Roll of Honor & Memories - All Other Conflicts' started by GRW, Aug 14, 2013.

  1. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    "Yoram Kaniuk, who has died aged 83, was one of Israel’s most respected but controversial novelists; in his youth he fought in the 1948 war that led to the founding of Israel, but he did not like what the Jewish state became.


    He wrote some 30 books, several of which were translated into English, and was probably best known for his darkly comic Adam Resurrected (1969), which was made into a 2008 film directed by Paul Schrader and starring Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe and Derek Jacobi. The book, regarded as a central work of Holocaust literature, tells the story of a Jewish-German clown in a Nazi concentration camp whose life is spared because he plays his violin for the prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and provides entertainment for the camp commandant by pretending to be a dog. He ends up in an asylum for Holocaust survivors in Israel’s Negev desert, an institution whose identity shifts to and fro from desert paradise, to prison and to the state of Israel itself.







    Kaniuk’s ambivalence about the state of Israel was also apparent in his autobiographical novel 1948 (2010), which won Israel’s top literary award, the Sapir Prize. In the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Kaniuk, then 17, had served in the Palmach, an elite division of the Haganah, but the bewildered young protagonist of 1948 is unsure whether the Jews are entitled to a state of their own. The new state’s heirs, he reflects, “are idiots, fools, robbers, wicked people who’ve forgotten where they came from”, but shortly afterwards he recalls: “After I got back home half dead and the country was filled with Holocaust survivors who were a thousand times stronger than us, I realised that it had been worthwhile.”


    The main cause of Kaniuk’s disillusionment with the state he had helped to create was the power in secular affairs of a religious establishment that he felt represented neither the views and values of the vast majority of Israelis, nor those of the global Jewish community. Kaniuk’s wife, Miranda, was a Christian, and because Orthodox rabbinical law identifies only those born to a Jewish mother as Jews, the couple’s daughters were officially classified as being “without religion”. As a result his infant grandson, though born in Israel, had fewer rights than his “Jewish” compatriots, including no legal right to be married in Israel.


    In 2011 Kaniuk went to court to challenge a ruling by Israel’s Interior Ministry that he could not change his status on the state population register from “Jewish” to “no religion”. When the court ruled in his favour, he hailed the verdict as a step along the road to a “true separation of religion and state with a pluralistic society”. But, last year, Israel’s High Court of Justice turned down his petition to give Israeli citizens a general right to be recorded as having “no religion” in the population register.


    Yoram Kaniuk was born on May 2 1930 in Tel Aviv, in what was then British Mandate Palestine. His father, originally from Galicia, would become the first curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His mother was from Odessa.


    After joining the Palmach aged 17, Kaniuk took part in battles around Jerusalem in 1948 and was injured while fighting on Mount Zion. Later he worked as a sailor on a ship that brought Holocaust survivors from Europe to Israel."
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/10243502/Yoram-Kaniuk.html
     

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