Between Life and Death

The final literary testament of “one of Israel’s greatest and least celebrated writers” (Nicole Krauss),Between Life and Death is a startlingly brave, funny, poetic, and moving autobiographical novel about the four months Yoram Kaniuk spent in a coma near the end of his life. 

In Between Life and Death, famed Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk (“one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World” —New York Times) describes the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the world of the living and that of the dead. With his unique blend of playfulness and fearlessness, Kaniuk attempts to penetrate his own lost consciousness and understand what led him to fight for his life with such desperate stubbornness.

With rare sincerity and great courage, Kaniuk goes back to his own death throes and reprieve, as well as to the waystations of his life. The story shifts between memory and illusion, imagination and testimony. Kaniuk inquires into the place of death in society, the human lust for life and relationships between human beings, among whom we find soldiers in battle, friends and family. Events and people—some real, some not—blend into a vast fresco, a larger-than-life story about life itself.

Kaniuk also writes about the Jewish people, the Holocaust survivors in his childhood neighborhood, heroic stories and battles on which he was raised and the 1948 War of Independence in which he fought. This book, in which the author announces his rebirth at the age of seventy-four, is the final literary testament of one of the world’s greatest overlooked writers.

Yoram Kaniuk (1930 - 2013) was born in Tel Aviv and took part in Israel's War of Independence in 1948. A painter, journalist, and theater critic, he was best known as a novelist. His 29 books includeThe Acrophile (1960), Himmo, King of Jerusalem (1968), Adam Resurrected (1971),Rockinghorse (1977), Confessions of a Good Arab (1984), His Daughter (1987),Commander of the Exodus (1999), The Last Jew (2006), 1948 (2010) andBetween Life and Death, and have been translated into twenty languages. He won the Bialik Prize, the French Prix de Droits de l'Homme, the Israeli President's Prize, the Newman Prize and the Sapir Prize for Literature.

Barbara Harshav has been translating works from French, German, Hebrew and Yiddish for over twenty years and has currently published over forty books of translation including works of poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, economics, sociology, and history.