Rivka Keren

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Rivka Keren (2008)

Rivka Keren ( Hebrew רבקה קרן; born July 24, 1946 in Debrecen , Hungary ) is an Israeli writer.

life and work

Rivka Keren was born in Hungary in 1946. Her first years of life were marked by a feeling of loneliness and insecurity. She overheard her relatives whispering about the Holocaust , that a brother of hers died of starvation as a baby in a ghetto , that her father miraculously survived his imprisonment in a concentration camp and returned very emaciated, but that other relatives had died there. During her school days she became Jewish in an intolerant environment in the Communist People's Republic of Hungaryharassed as belonging to an undesirable minority. In 1957 the family emigrated to Israel. The following years saw a mixture of financial struggle for existence, assimilation, apprehension, hard work and self-expression. During her school days at the boarding school of the Israel Goldstein Youth Village, Rivka Keren began to publish in a Hungarian-language magazine. At the age of seventeen she wrote her first novella, "Ruthi-Schmuti", which has autobiographical features and which she published in 1970. In it she expresses her experiences as a young immigrant and as a student at the boarding school. Encouraged by her teacher of Hebrew literature, she wrote this work in Hebrew, as did her other books. Decades later, she summed up the fact that her identity is shaped by the tense coexistence of her Hungarian mother tongue and the Hebrew language in the sentence that she writes in Hebrew and dreams in Hungarian.

Rivka Keren began studying art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, which she continued in New York. At the Bar-Ilan University , she studied psychology and completed her studies by specializing in Clinical Psychology at the University of Tel Aviv . Until 1986 she worked as a psychologist and painter. Then her husband ran a hotel in Saint Thomas , US Virgin Islands, and the family moved there. She gave up her profession as a psychologist and devoted herself there and after returning to Israel to writing and painting.

Keren initially wrote seven books for children and young people, some of which she illustrated herself. The books created from 1990 onwards are novels for adults. She was awarded the Ze'ev Prize for her youth book Bittersüßer Sommer . She also received the Nordau Prize and the Kugel Prize.

Individual works

Keren's second book was published in 1974 in the original Hebrew with the title Kati , in the German translation in 1996 as Katalin . In this autobiographical novel, she describes, in the form of a diary, her life in Debrecen, Hungary, the terrifying days during the popular uprising in 1956 and finally leaving Hungary after secretly obtaining an exit visa.

The book Bittersüßer Sommer is about sometimes sad, sometimes happy moments in the life of an adolescent girl and is set in a rural settlement in Israel in the 1950s.

Works in German translation

  • Katalin . Translated from the Hebrew by Mirjam Pressler , Verlag St. Gabriel, Mödling 1996. As a licensed edition: Verlag Beltz and Gelberg, Weinheim 1999
  • Bittersweet summer . Translated from the Hebrew by Mirjam Pressler, Verlag Gabriel, Vienna 1999. As a licensed edition: Verlag Beltz and Gelberg, Weinheim 2001
  • Anatomy of a vengeance . Translated from the Hebrew by Helene Seidler, Bleicher Verlag , Gerlingen 2001
  • The taste of honey . From the Hebrew by Helene Seidler, Haland and Wirth published by Psychosozial-Verlag , Gießen 2004, ISBN 978-3-89806-939-7

literature

  • Rivka Keren , in: Mirjam Morad (Ed.): Encounter with children's and youth literature from Israel . Catalog for the event week and exhibition. (ZIRKULAR special number 39, June 1994), Documentation Center for Newer Austrian Literature in the Literaturhaus , Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-900467-39-0 , pp. 72–73

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Writing in Hebrew, Dreaming in Hungarian: Duality as Destiny - Rivka Keren. In: www.ebibliotekos.com. June 22, 2010. Retrieved November 29, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Encounter with children's and youth literature from Israel , 1994, p. 72
  3. ↑ Rivka Keren. In: www.ithl.org.il. Retrieved November 29, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Kati - A Diary of a Young Girl. In: www.ithl.org.il. Retrieved November 29, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Encounter with children's and youth literature from Israel , 1994, p. 73
  6. ↑ Bittersweet Summer. In: www.ithl.org.il. Retrieved November 29, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Keren, Rivka
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Debrecen , Hungary