He did it his way

Yoram Kaniuk made no apologies for his writing style, and he always called things as he saw them.

By BARRY DAVIS
Yoram Kaniuk370 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Yoram Kaniuk370
(photo credit: REUTERS)
In 2003, Yoram Kaniuk, the famed writer and painter who died on Saturday at the age of 83, published a book called I Did It My Way (aka Life on Sandpaper), based on his recollections of his sojourn in New York from 1950 to 1960. The title of the autobiographical tome, and the content, typified the author’s approach to his life and work.
Kaniuk did not operate along orthodox lines – not in his writing and painting, not in his lifestyle, and not in his observations about political and social goings on here. In May 2011, he submitted a request to have his religious classification officially changed from “Jew” to “no religion,” after his grandson was defined as the latter. Kaniuk was married to a non-Jewish, American- born woman, and as such, their daughter, the child’s mother, was also considered non-Jewish. When I met him a couple of years ago following the staging of his award-winning book 1948, which recounts his experiences as a soldier during the War of Independence, he noted that he had served his country adequately for his first grandson to be accepted as Jewish. He told me that if the state did not recognize the baby as Jewish, he opted to forgo that religious identity, too.
Sitting with him a couple of years ago in his compact Tel Aviv home, I got the impression of a man who was used to speaking his mind, with no frills attached. He made no apologies for his writing style, and he always called things as he saw them.
“I have been told that I write in an unacceptable literary style,” he told me.
“But I write the way I speak. I couldn’t write [in the accepted professional way], so I felt helpless, and my style of writing came out of this helplessness.”
He also noted that some had remarked that the factual accuracy of his War of Independence account left something to be desired, but he said that to his mind, it didn’t matter whether some of things he described in 1948 actually took place.
“That’s how I remember them,” he said.
As a counter for that criticism, he noted that “a man came up to me recently and told me he’d bought the book and that he was a general in the IDF. He told me it was the first time he’d read a book that was about the war that came from within the war.”
Kaniuk never balked from potentially controversial situations, and that was a mark of the man and the artist. His writing style and his take on life gave all his work a personal edge. His texts often followed the freely unraveling lines of streams of consciousness, and that trend is particularly prominent in I Did It My Way.
There were plenty of colorful goings on within his New York social circle during the 1950s, and there is the added spice of his close relationships with some of the giants of the jazz world at the time – the likes of bebop founder saxophonist Charlie Parker and singer Billie Holiday (the latter, Kaniuk told me, was particularly caustic about the writer’s adeptness as a kisser). He also regularly rubbed shoulders with the likes of artist Willem de Kooning, playwright Tennessee Williams and actor Marlon Brando, and there was a hectic foray to Guatemala to look for diamonds in between bohemian escapades in the Big Apple.
Kaniuk did his best to further his painting exploits during his time in the States, but he eventually returned here because he longed to hear and speak Hebrew. Back in his home country, and comfortably reensconced in his linguistic roots, his literary career soon took off. The Acrophile, a collection of short stories, came out in 1960. Five years later, he published Himmo King of Jerusalem, based on an unlikely love story set in a monastery in Ein Kerem. Although he was born and lived most of his life in Tel Aviv, he had a special bond with Jerusalem, which began from the time he was stationed in and around the besieged capital during the War of Independence.
While he was spared the fate of European Jewry during World War II, the Holocaust came to play a pivotal role in his writing and life. He came across survivors soon after the end of the war, and he subsequently served on rickety vessels that plied the route between Europe and Israel, packed to the gunwales with former concentration camp inmates desperate to start a new life in the home of the Jews. It was on these trips that he first began to understand the enormity of the catastrophe that had befallen European Jewry.
The Holocaust also appears frontand- center in his Adam Resurrected (1971) – which the writer has described as an account of “Holocaust survivors who set up a home for the emotionally disturbed in the desert, and wait for God who went up in smoke” – as well as in The Last Jew (2007) and the darkly comical The Last Berliner (2004).
Over the years, his somewhat oddball literary gifts were recognized both here and abroad. His books were translated into 25 languages, and he ran up an impressive list of awards, including the Sapir Prize for Literature (for 1948), the 1999 Bialik Prize for Literature, the 2000 Prix Mediterranee Etranger for Commander of the Exodus (1999), and the 1998 Israeli President’s Prize. He was also awarded an honorary PhD from Tel Aviv University – an honor of which he was particularly proud.
Kaniuk also published several children’s books, including The House Where Cockroaches Live to a Ripe Old Age, and the delightful Wasserman, which tells the tale of an abandoned and abused dog that finds a good home.
The writer received the Ze’ev Prize for Children’s Literature in 1980.
In 2005, he underwent an operation for cancer, and was not expected to survive.
Had the surgery been unsuccessful, he would have missed out on the glory of his later years, which included a March 2006 international conference at Cambridge University, dedicated to his works.
Typically, he donated his body to science and asked for his remains to be cremated.
In a blog post this past March, Kaniuk wrote: “I sit and write now, with some degree of sadness, and with the not-toopleasant feeling that my time has come.”
When I called him last month to wish him a happy birthday and to ask after his health, his characteristically unflinching reply was, “I am sick, but that means I am alive.”
You could say Yoram Kaniuk lived life to the full.