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The Winding Path of Memory – Yoram Kaniuk's Writing on the 1948 War

Mon, December 17, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

For over 60 years, the 1948 War and its traumatic memories haunted the Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk. Born in Tel Aviv in 1930, Kaniuk left school at the age of 17 to join the Palmah and take part in the battles around Jerusalem during the war. His experiences in combat, his wounds, and the friends who were injured or killed left their marks on Kaniuk's personality and became the source of inspiration for his writings. Kaniuk passed away in 2013.
This talk explores Kaniuk's writings about the war by discussing an episode that reappears in many variants in his books, as well as in drafts I found in his literary estate. Kaniuk's process of writing about the 1948 War, which demonstrates how he coped with the traumatic events, shifts from a distant point of view in his early writings during the 1950's and 1960's, while creating a deterritorialization of the Zionist territory as well as other vectors of the time and context, to a very intimate vision and personal testimony in his seminal novel TASHAH (1948), published in 2010.

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