Colleagues Remember Israeli Writer Amir Gutfreund

Amir Gutfreund, one of the finest of a younger generation of writers in Israel, passed away from cancer on November 27 at Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa. He was 52. Gutfreund was the author of six books; a seventh, Mountain of Happiness is scheduled to be published by his Israeli publisher Kineret Zmora Bitan in January 2016. He was called one of Israel’s most “beloved” writers in a tribute in Haaretz. “What has been heartening is seeing the Israeli response to his death—front page of newspapers, top-of-the-radio news, rebroadcasting of his appearances,”Gutfreund’s agent, Deborah Harris, wrote to me in an email. “Amir touched a core of Israeli humanity very deeply, which he could do as the caring sensitive person he was.”

Gutfreund’s first book, Our Holocaust, published in Hebrew in 2001 and in English in 2006, is the story of two children in Haifa—children of Holocaust survivors—who are doing detective work to figure out what happened “over there.” Nili Gold, associate professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Pennsylvania told me that what makes Gutfreund’s book unique is that it sees the “Holocaust from an unusual lens, with whole brushstrokes full of characters and people and worlds.” His publisher Matthew Miller added that “the childlike, almost naïve discovery of his neighborhood was very Amir; the warmth underlying the discovery of his parents’ generation very disarming.” Our Holocaust won the 2002 Buchman Prize from the Yad Vashem as well as the 2007 Sami Rohr Choice Award from the Jewish Book Council.

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