More in ‘Yoram Kaniuk’

In Israel, understanding the present sometimes requires traveling to the past. And what better guide than Susan Sontag: although she is remembered primarily for her writing, the renowned intellectual dabbled in filmmaking as well, and, in the fall of 1973, traveled to Israel to shoot a documentary,
Promised Lands, which will have a rare screening in Brooklyn on Tuesday. She couldn’t have picked a more dramatic moment: the Yom Kippur War was raging, and everywhere Sontag trained her camera she found a country newly despairing over the future prospect of living in peace with its Arab neighbors. The Israel of 1973, it turns out, is depressingly, and clarifyingly, familiar.

Jeff Goldblum in Adam Resurrected
In Adam Resurrected, opening today in New York City, Jeff Goldblum delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as Adam Stein, a Weimar-era cabaret star who in the 1960s is relegated to an Israeli insane asylum specifically for Holocaust survivors. As we learn in flashbacks, he survived a concentration camp by submitting to ...

Wounded in Israel’s war of Independence, Yoram Kaniuk ran away to bohemia. Gandy, a friend Kaniuk made in Paris, helped get him set up in Greenwich Village, and before long he was bumping into James Agee, Willem de Kooning, Marlon Brando, Stanley Kubrick…
An apartment on Fifth Avenue and 10th needed a painter. I went along ...

Yoram Kaniuk could be called a writer’s writer; though singled out by Susan Sontag as the great Israeli voice of his generation, he never found the acclaim of his contemporaries Amos Oz or Aharon Appelfeld. But this may be his moment. This week, Kaniuk heads to the University of Cambridge where devotees are convening for ...