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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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