After reading Returning Lost Loves, @The Source Israel was curious to know more about its author, Yehoshua Kenaz. So we telephoned Kenaz in his home in Tel Aviv and asked the 1995 Bialik Prize winner to tell us about himself and his work. A person who appears to guard his privacy, his novels are based on a combination of his life's reality and his imagination. In fact, Kenaz views the creative process as mysterious.

"I write for the local, Israeli, Hebrew readers. I never care how my books are interpreted abroad," said Kenaz. In fact, he seems to handle his international acclaim, as a minor accomplishment at best.

Kenaz was born in Petach Tikva, Israel, in 1937. He studied philosophy and romance languages at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and French Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. Kenaz has won every major literary prize awarded in Israel, is translated into several European languages as well as English, and is an avid classical music fan.

Living and writing without a modem, or any other means for Internet connection, Kenaz seems to maintain a very traditional novelist's life, simply writing for the sake of writing.

Returning Lost Loves centers on the inhabitants of a Tel Aviv apartment building whose lives intersect unexpectedly in a bizarre twist of events. Kenaz said that while the book is very Israeli in the way the characters relate to one another, their issues and personalities are universal.

"The stories and relationships involve than a local story. The characters are uniquely Israeli at the core but I do hope and expect that readers (in other languages) will understand them quite well," said Kenaz.

Black humor and satire run through the story. The characters include Eyal, an army conscript who defects, and his anguished parents; an old Ashkenazi Jew who is determined to keep the building free of lower class Sephardic newcomers; Gabi, a lonely single woman having an affair with Hezi, a married womanizer who rents a love nest for them in the apartment complex; Aviram, a bachelor who is very curious about his neighbor Hezi; and a stroke victim who lives with his caregivers. Each character is busy dealing with difficult issues, frustrations and alienations of modern life.

@The Source Israel asked Kenaz if he thought his characters were depressed.

"The characters in the novel are not depressed; they have their problems, and trouble coping with their problems," says Kenaz. "The stories are the kind of personal issues that are told in novels. The elderly man is not depressed: he is in a period of his life where he starts to believe that he is the child of the two Filipino caregivers. It is a sign of hope as if to be reborn, explains Kenaz.

Kenaz's newest work, Landscape With Three Trees, a book comprising a novel and novella, was published in Hebrew in January 2001.

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