Amalia Kahana-Carmon

Amalia Kahana was born on Kibbutz Ein Harod, a daughter of Chaim Kahana, one of the founders of the kibbutz, and his wife Sara Crispin. Her father had emigrated to Palestine from the Ukraine and her mother from Bulgaria. She grew up mostly in Tel Aviv. Amalia's studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem were interrupted in 1948 by the War of Independence, in which she served as a radio operator in a Palmach unit. She spent the years 1951 to 1955 studying and working in England, and 1955 to 1957 in Switzerland. In 1951, she met and married an Israeli student in London, Arie Carmon. The couple had three children before divorcing in 1978. Amalia Kahana-Carmon earned a master's degree in literature from Hebrew University in 1964. Her first book of novellas and short stories, Under One Roof, was published in 1966. Her other works include And Moon in the Valley of Ayalon (1971), Magnetic Fields (1977), High Stakes (1980), Up in Montifer (1984), With Her on Her Way Home (1991), and Here We’ll Live (1996. Since the mid-1980s, she has been considered the most outspoken feminist critic of Israeli literature and Jewish culture. She was awarded the Israel Prize in 2000.