KANIUK, Yoram

PUBLICATIONS

Novels

The Acrophile (translation). 1961.

Ha-yored le-ma'lah. 1963.

Himmo melekh yerushalaim. 1966; as Himmo, King of Jerusalem, 1969.

Adam ben kelev [Son of Dog]. 1969; as Adam Resurrected, 1971.

Susets. 1973; as Rockinghorse, 1977.

Ha-sipur al doda shlomtsion ha-gedola. 1975; as The Story of Aunt Shlomzion the Great, 1979.

Hayehudi ha'ahron [The Last Jew]. 1982.

Aravi tov. 1983; as Confessions of a Good Arab, 1984.

Bito. 1987; as His Daughter, 1988.

Ahavat David [The Second Book of David]. 1990.

Post-mortem. 1992.

Taigerhil [Tigerhill]. 1995.

Od sipur ahavah [Another Love Story]. 1996.

Nevelot-ha-sipur ha-amiti [Bastards, the Real Story]. 1997.

Short Stories

Mot ha-avir [Death of a Donkey]. 1973.

Afar ve-teshukah [Soil and Desire]. 1975.

Laila al hof im tranzistor [A Night on the Beach]. 1979.

Kemo sipurim. 1983.

Arba sipurim ve-shir [Four Stories and a Poem]. 1985.

Sipurei sof shavua [Weekend Stories]. 1986.

Other

Mi-metulah li-Nyu York (for children). 1963.

Ha-bavit she-bo metim ha-jukim mi-seivah tovah [The House Where the Cockroaches Lived to a Ripe Old Age] (for children). 1976.

Ha-ganav ha-nadiv [A Generous Thief] (for children). 1980.

Wasserman (for children). 1988.

Yovi, haluk nahal ve-ha-pil [Job, Pebble and the Elephant] (for children). 1993.

Ha-saga shel mefaked ha-exodus. 1999; as Commander of the Exodus, 1999.

*

Film Adaptations:

Rockinghorse; The Vulture, 1982, from the novel, The Last Jew; Himmo, King of Jerusalem, 1987.

Critical Studies:

Encounters with Israeli Authors, 1982, and "Native Israeli Literature and the Spectre of Jewish History" (interview), in Modern Hebrew Literature, (Israel), 8(1-2), Fall/Winter 1982-83, pp. 60-65, both by Ester Fuchs; "Ambitions and Obsessions" by Jeffrey M. Green, in Modern Hebrew Literature, 9(3-4), Spring/Summer 1984, pp. 61-66; "Rochelle Furstenberg Interviews Yoram Kaniuk: Profile of a Tel Aviv Writer" by Rochelle Furstenberg, in Modern Hebrew Literature, 2, Spring 1989; pp. 4-6; "The Bride of the Dead: Phallocentrism and War in Himmo, King of Jerusalem " by Yosefa Loshitzky, in Literature/Film Quarterly, 21(3), 1993, pp. 218-29; "Fact and Fiction by Yoram Kaniuk" by Leo Haber, in Midstream, 46(8), 1 December 2000, p. 33.

* * *

Despite never having experienced the Holocaust personally, Yoram Kaniuk has been hailed as one of the most important Hebrew writers of the Holocaust. While working as a sailor on a migrant ship and meeting Holocaust refugees after 1948, the Holocaust became an obsession for the author. Although he never lived in the concentration camps, Kaniuk felt as though he had survived the Holocaust in a kind of assumed biographical identity. Many of his works revolve around the Holocaust as well as other events in Jewish history concerned with the meaning of the settlement of Israel after the Holocaust and containing often grotesque descriptions of the pathos of the Holocaust juxtaposed with an absurd form of nation building in Israel.

Since the 1950s a change had occurred in Hebrew literature as attitude shifted away from the Zionist narrative featuring heroic Sabras and pioneers to more ambiguous protagonists in the story of Jewish life in the postwar era. Hebrew literature also delivered an ambiguous view of the Holocaust and Germany and the roles these play in Israeli and Jewish life. The main body of work that contrasted the paradigmatic, traditional literature at this time was postrealistic Hebrew literature, created by writers who were born in the 1930s and '40s and who made their mark in the mid-'50s. Kaniuk is one such author, alongside Binyamin Tamuz, Yizhak Orpaz, Yehuda Amichai, Nissim Aloni, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and, more broadly, Yaakov Shabtai and A.B. Yehoshua. Events such as the arrival of the first survivors of the Holocaust in Israel in the late 1940s and early '50s, the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, and the Six-Day War shaped the development of Kaniuk and these other authors. These events released new literary forms and subjects as well as new styles and characters that moved away from realistic literary tradition.

Kaniuk deals with the new uprooted characters who do not fit into the Zionist model of building and renewal of the nation; characters who belong to the lumpen strata that are personified in some of Kaniuk's works as Holocaust survivors on the verge of lunacy. In speaking about his obsession with the Holocaust, Kaniuk stated in an interview, "If literature is something through which the absurd becomes legitimate, my writing legitimises my attempt to convey the horror I did not experience physically" and that "black humour is the only viable response to the absurd," shedding light on some of the literary techniques Kaniuk deploys in dealing with the Holocaust in his stories.

Kaniuk's works are imbued with sadness but are still dominated by an optimistic air. Rather than lamenting on the loss in the form of a nostalgic elegy, Kaniuk writes satirical stories that poignantly question the validity of normative attitudes toward the Holocaust. He and his fellow writers drew characters and perspectives that had previously been relegated to the periphery of Jewish experience as seen in Hebrew literature to the center stage. Implied in Kaniuk's literary treatment of the Holocaust is a belief that the elements that were lost in the creation of a new state must be revisited. The old Jew and the Diaspora experience parallel the aspects of human existence that do not receive adequate attention; the animalistic side of all humans, the brutal side, the madness that in turn defines sanity—these are the elements that must be given a voice so as to comprehend the events that shape not only the Jewish identity but also human existence.

—Ziva Shavitsky

See the essay on Adam Resurrected.