Yoram Kaniuk, reluctant soldier in 1948

Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. After his experience in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Kaniuk moved to New York where he became a painter in Greenwich Village. Ten years later he returned to Tel Aviv, where he has lived ever since, working as a novelist, painter, and journalist. He has published various fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books over the course of his distinguished career.

In 1948 — for which he was awarded the The Sapir Prize in 2010 — Kaniuk recalls fighting as a teenage soldier in Israel’s War of Independence. Told in the first person the book looks at how memory is a selective process; one that favours myth making and narrative, rather than recalling actual events. Kaniuk’s narrative also asks how culpable the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was in creating the political turmoil that is still present in the state of Israel today.

Last month, NYRB Lit: an ebook series affiliated with The New York Review of Books, published a translation of Kaniuk’s book, which was originally written in Hebrew.