Amalia Kahana-Carmon (; 18 October 1926 – 16 January 2019) was an Israeli author and literary critic. She was awarded the Israel Prize for literature in 2000.

Biography

Amalia Kahana-Carmon was born in Kibbutz Ein Harod on 18 October 1926. She moved to Tel Aviv as a child and studied at Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, but her studies were interrupted by the 1948 Palestine war where she served in the Negev Brigade of Palmach as a signals operator and wrote the famous telegram for the capture of Eilat. Soon after graduating, she moved to Switzerland (1951 to 1955) and then to England (1955 to 1957) before moving back to Tel Aviv to work as a librarian and writer.

Family

Kahana-Carmon’s father, Chaim Kahana (1890-1910), immigrated to Palestine in 1910. In Palestine, he received a rabbinical education and both invented and held consultations for technical mechanisms. Her mother, Sara Crispin (1903-1985), was born in Bulgaria and attended the Hebrew Teachers Seminary in Bulgaria before immigrating to Palestine in 1922 where she studied bee-keeping at the Mikveh Israel Agricultural School. Crispin spent the rest of her life as a bee-keeper and Hebrew teacher. Kahana-Carmon had one younger sister named Miriam (b. 1929). While Kahana-Carmon was in London in 1951, she met and married an Israeli student named Arie Carmon, who studied civil engineering. They had three children together–Raya (b. 1953), Iddo (b. 1956), and Haggai (b. 1959)–before divorcing in 1978. Her writing differed from these groups in an important way: it centered around the individual rather than national ideals. This does not mean that Kahana-Carmon was not influenced by others; in fact, her writing was shaped by Nehamah Pukhachewsky (1869-1934), who wrote about the struggles of women pioneers in Palestine, and Devorah Baron (1886-1956), who wrote about the victimization of women in male-dominated religious Jewish institutions. Many also believe that Kahana-Carmon’s writing was influenced by Virginia Woolf because of their shared lyrical, poetic style, but Kahana-Carmon commented that this relation was due to similarity in thought rather than any influence.

Furthermore, Kahana-Carmon’s characters are outsiders in their societies because of their genders, classes, or races. Some of them even cross gender and race boundaries, such as in Up in Montifer. In this novella, Clara, the heroine, has a black, freed slave as her companion. She reaches independence as a merchant through dialogue with this freed slave, where both characters are gender and race conscious.

Kahana-Carmon also wrote feminist critiques of Israeli literature and culture. These essays were inspired by a trip to America where she attended an international meeting for writers and was introduced to Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), who wrote postcolonial criticisms about race relations. She was also inspired by gender critiques from Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986).

  • In 1995, Kahana-Carmon received the Newman Prize.
  • In 1995, Kahana-Carmon received the ACUM Prize.
  • In 1997, Kahana-Carmon received the President’s Prize.

Published works

  • Under One Roof (1966)
  • And Moon in the Valley of Ayalon (1971)
  • A Piece for the Stage, in the Grand Manner (1975)
  • Magnetic Fields (1977)
  • High Stakes (1980)
  • Up in Montifer (1984)
  • With Her on Her Way Home (1991)
  • Here We'll Live (1996)

See also

  • Hebrew literature
  • List of Israel Prize recipients

References

Further reading

  • Nili Gold, Review of With Her on Her Way Home by Amalia Kahana-Carmon. “To Reach the Source: Amalia Kahana-Carmon,” Modern Hebrew Literature, No. 10, 43-46 (1993).
  • Yael S. Feldman, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women's Fiction (Columbia UP, 1999), Ch.3: "Empowering the Other: Amalya Kahana-Carmon" (pp. 61–89).
  • Jewish Women's Archive page