Eva Avi-Yonah

Eva Avi-Yonah (born April 11, 1921 in Vienna as Eva Boyko ; † October 3, 2011 in Jerusalem ) was an Israeli children's book author , poet , painter and drawing teacher of Austrian origin.

Live and act

Eva Avi-Yonah was born on April 11, 1921 as the daughter of the two botanists Hugo and Elisabeth Boyko (later Elisheva Boyko; née Spitzer; 1898–1985) in Vienna. The family, the two adults with their three children, emigrated to Palestine for Zionist reasons at the end of 1935 . Her parents then became pioneers in Israeli desert research. Her father received the Sandford-Fleming Medal for his research on saline irrigation and her mother pioneered the creation of the first park, the Botanic Garden Eilat , in the city of Eilat on the Red Sea in 1950. Before that, the mother had in 1950 1931 PhD in botany at the University of Vienna . The father, a plant sociologist , was released from his position at the University of Vienna after the annexation of Austria and prepared to emigrate to Palestine with his family in 1933/34.

Boyko already occupied himself with philosophy and art shortly after emigrating and lived in Nahariya until 1950 during the Israeli War of Independence . Here she did a variety of odd jobs and in her free time was mostly artistically active. So she painted or wrote poems and little stories for friends. After her training at the Bezalel art academy in Jerusalem, she trained in painting in 1950 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the neoclassicist Jean Souverbie and also visited Fernand Léger's studio . In later years she taught drawing at several schools or was busy organizing exhibitions. She also wrote various articles in Hebrew for an educational magazine. Her main focus was on the stylistic elements of the drawings of émigré children. In the later 1960s Avi-Yonah published the two children's books Aphusi, the sensitive rhinoceros and The Queen Esther and the Bulldozer , both of which were kept in Hebrew and appeared in 1968 through the publisher Am Ha-Sefer . Avi-Yonah also created the illustrations for both books, which were particularly popular in the kibbutzim . Her first marriage was the silversmith Hans Rawinsky; this marriage remained childless and was divorced not long after the marriage. In 1955 she married the archaeologist and art historian Michael Avi-Yonah , who died in 1974 and with whom she had a son named Reuven (* 1957), who later became a lawyer and historian. She accompanied her second husband on longer stays abroad, where she deepened her artistic training in Rome and London and increasingly dealt with sculpture .

After the death of her husband, she studied philosophy, art history and German literature , with her master's thesis dealing with the topic of art borders . Her dissertation was again entitled Abstraction and Latent Meaning . In 1974 she became a member of the poets group VOICES , shortly afterwards of the German-speaking group LYRIS . In addition to poems and children's books, in 2009 she published the spiritist-esoterically interested autobiography From My Seven Lives . One of her sisters, Mary B. Doray , who emigrated to New York , also wrote children's books and was also employed as a dance teacher and New Age teacher. Avi-Yonah poems have also been widely printed in foreign magazines. As a painter she also had several exhibitions. In 2000 and 2001 she exhibited her paintings at the Nora Gallery in Jerusalem, as well as at the Jerusalem Artists House . As a writer, she published well into old age and published some lyrical works in the year of her death. When she was over 80 years old, she took part in international exhibitions with her paintings.

Avi-Yonah died on October 3, 2011 at the age of 90 in Jerusalem.

Awards and honors

Eva Avi-Yonah has received numerous honors and awards throughout her life. In 1964 she won first prize among others in a design competition for a mosaic on the by Yosef Sprinzak named Sprinzak Building on the campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem .

Works (selection)

• 1968: Aphusi, the sensitive rhinoceros
• 1968: Queen Esther and the bulldozer
• 1992: Lyric for the cat
• 1994: Quiet ... no oaths
• 1999: Poetry for the cat
• 2009: From my seven lives . rainStein, ISBN 978-3-940634-07-8 .
• 2010: Focus (Poetry). rainStein 2010, ISBN 978-3-940634-13-9 .
• 2011: Tagewerk (poetry). rainStein 2011, ISBN 978-3-940634-18-4 .

literature

• Susanne Blumesberger , Michael Doppelhofer , Gabriele Mauthe : Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. (three volumes) . Ed .: Austrian National Library . tape 1 . KG Saur Verlag , Munich 2002, ISBN 978-3-598-11545-5 .
• Ilse Korotin : biografiA. Lexicon of Austrian Women (four volumes) . tape 1 . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-79590-2 , p. 167 .
• Susanne Blumesberger : Handbook of Austrian authors of books for children and young people (two volumes) . tape 1 . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-205-78552-1 , p. 77-79 .
• Exile and Gender II: Politics, Education and the Arts from the series "Yearbook of the Research Center for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Volume 18" . Brill (before that also Rodopi ), Leiden 2017, ISBN 978-90-04-34352-8 , p. 205, 209-211, 214 and 216 .

Web links

• Eva Avi-Yonah on the official website of the Berlin publisher rainStein
• Eva Avi-Yonah on the official website of the University of Vienna

Individual evidence

1. ↑ From my seven lives (review). In: DAVID Jewish culture magazine. April 2010, accessed March 22, 2018 . 
2. ^ Exhibition by Eva Avi – Yonah , accessed on October 9, 2019