Yoram Kaniuk

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Yoram Kaniuk (2008)

Yoram Kaniuk ; Hebrew יורם קניוק (born May 2, 1930 in Tel Aviv ; died June 8, 2013 there ) was an Israeli writer , painter , journalist and theater critic . The focus of his work was on the relationship between Judaism and Israel and the confrontation with the Shoah , as the forerunner of “literature of the second generation”, in which children of survivors deal with the trauma of their parents.

Life

Kaniuk's father, Mosche Itzchak, came from the small Galician town of Tarnopol , later studied at Heidelberg University and, after emigrating, was the founder and first director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art . His mother, who came from Russia, came to Israel as a child in 1909, where she was a teacher and school inspector and wrote textbooks. In his (auto) biographical novel Das Glück im Exil , Kaniuk tells of the life of his parents and his own experiences as a child of two very opposing characters, whereby he experiences the mother in particular as predominantly cold and repellent.

Kaniuk left high school in Tel Aviv at the age of 17 to become a Palmach fighter under Jitzchak Rabin . He later served on a ship that brought Holocaust survivors to Israel. After Kaniuk was wounded in the Palestine War in 1948 , he moved to New York for ten years . In 1961 he returned to Israel.

He published u. a. seventeen novels , six volumes of short stories and four children's books . In Israel, his books long failed to succeed while they were being translated into twenty foreign languages. During his lifetime, however, he was recognized as an important representative of young Israeli literature in his home country . The Tel Aviv University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011 .

His best-known novel Adam Hundesohn (1968) was published in Germany in 1989 and was a great success. He was filmed in 2008 by Paul Schrader as Adam Resurrected .

When Yoram Kaniuk fell ill with cancer, the nightclub pioneer Rolf Eden paid the treatment costs. "He saved my life with it," said Yoram Kaniuk in the 2011 documentary The Big Eden .

During his lifetime, Yoram Kaniuk had decreed not to receive a funeral, but to make his body available to science.

Legal status as an Israeli

In May 2011, Kaniuk submitted a petition to the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, requesting that his religious status be changed in his passport from “Jew” to “No religion”. Kaniuk justified this with the fact that his child and his grandchild came from a mixed Judeo-Christian marriage and for this reason legally have the entry “No religion” in their passport, and he would subsequently have the same status out of solidarity. Furthermore, he did not wish to be called "Jewish Iranian" or "what is today's religion of Israel". In October 2011, an administrative court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, so that Kaniuk had "Jew" in his passport as a nationality, but had no entry in the religion section. Hundreds of Israelis followed this step. Since then, the process of removing one's religious affiliation from the passport has been called “lehitkaniuk” (eng. “Concealment”) in Israel.

Works (in German translation)

Film adaptations

literature

  • Yoram Kaniuk: Galicia in Vienna . In: Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz (Ed.): Between East and West. Galician Jews and Vienna . Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, Vienna 2000, pp. 8–20 (Kaniuk about his father in Vienna)

Web links

Commons : Yoram Kaniuk  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Stefana Sabin: Mirror Gallery of Fears - On the death of the Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . No. 131 . Zurich June 10, 2013, p. 42 .
  2. ^ Honorary doctorates from Tel Aviv University
  3. ↑ Andreas Platthaus: An exception in his generation. faz.net, June 9, 2013, accessed June 12, 2013
  4. ^ Documentary The Big Eden about Rolf Eden and with Yoram Kaniuk on www.welt.de, December 8, 2011
  5. ↑ Celebrated Israeli author: Yoram Kaniuk is dead on www.spiegel.de, June 9, 2013
  6. ↑ a b Mualem, Mazal (May 15, 2011). "Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk asks court to cancel his 'Jewish' status". Haaretz.
  7. ^ Gorenberg, Gershom (October 19, 2011). " A Jew of No Religion ". The American Prospect.
personal data
SURNAME Kaniuk, Yoram
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli writer, painter and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Tel Aviv
DATE OF DEATH June 8, 2013
Place of death Tel Aviv