I spoke to Rona Kenan at Protest Sunday following Murder attack at Homo-Lesb Center.
August 6, 2009 nytimes.com
Amos Kenan, Israeli Writer and Iconoclast, Dies at 82
Amos Kenan, an iconoclastic Israeli writer whose anti-religious and anti-Zionist views made him a longstanding irritant to the political establishment, died on Tuesday in Tel Aviv. He was 82.
Plans for his funeral were announced to The Associated Press by Uri Avnery, a friend and colleague of Mr. Kenan’s since they served together in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. No cause of death was given in wire-service reports.
Mr. Kenan, who fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war but also belonged to the anti-Zionist and anti-religious Canaanite movement, consistently roiled Israel’s political and cultural waters as a columnist, novelist, playwright, painter, sculptor, screenwriter and filmmaker. Somehow he maintained a career as a restaurant critic as well.
He was a scathing critic of Israeli religious leaders, and when the mood suited, extended his range beyond Judaism.
His play “Friends Talk About Jesus” was banned from the stage by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1972 for being unacceptably contemptuous of religion.
Politically he was unpredictable. In the 1980s he scandalized his old comrades from the pre-1948 underground when he compared the Palestinian struggle to their own youthful campaign, and in his fiction he took an absurdist, dystopian view of Israel’s future.
Mr. Kenan was born as Amos Levine in Tel Aviv. His parents were secular socialists, and as a teenager he joined the socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair (Youth Guard) and dropped out of high school to work in a factory.
As the struggle for Israeli statehood gathered momentum, he joined the Lehi, referred to by the British as the Stern Gang, the most extreme of the underground paramilitary organizations in Palestine.
At the same time, influenced by the poet Yonatan Ratosh, he joined the Canaanites, a small but influential group of artists and writers who hoped to build a Hebrew rather than a Jewish state in the biblical land of Canaan that would embrace both Arabs and Jews. It regarded Judaism and Islam as retrograde, and dissociated itself from the Jewish Diaspora. He was a founder of the group’s magazine, Alef.
After fighting in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1948 war, in which he was wounded, he began writing a satirical column, Uzi & Co., in the newspaper Haaretz, and began taking potshots at important religious figures.
In 1953 he was arrested on suspicion of throwing a bomb into the garden of the transportation minister, who had just banned driving on the Sabbath. Although the courts acquitted him, the newspaper’s publisher fired him.
From 1954 to 1962 he lived in Paris, where he wrote several plays influenced by the Theater of the Absurd.
He also wrote two newspaper columns, the Wandering Knife for Haolam Hazeh and Sparks From the City of Lights for Yediot Aharonot.
After returning to Israel in 1962, he picked up where he left off. He inaugurated a new column in Yediot Aharonot that ran for the next 40 years and published his first novella, “At the Station” (1963).
His most successful novel was “The Road to Ein Harod,” an Orwellian mixture of history, fantasy and philosophy in which an Israeli and an Arab are thrown together after a military coup sends Israel hurtling toward fascism.
In 1970 Mr. Kenan helped found the Israeli-Palestinian Council. He later joined Ariel Sharon’s Shlomtzion Party, named after Mr. Kenan’s daughter Shlomtzion.
Mr. Kenan is survived by his companion of nearly 50 years, Nurit Gertz, and their daughters, the poet and singer Rona Kenan and Shlomtzion Kenan.
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