Yoram Kaniuk

Di Yoram Kaniuk, morto qualche giorno fa, fa un bel ritratto Nicole Krauss. "After receiving a hundred of his letters, meeting him fifteen times, either at his apartment on Bilu Street or at a Tel Aviv café, and receiving too many calls from his cell phone to ever hope to return, I gave up trying to count the number of times that Yoram Kaniuk had died. For a while, after the first letter I received from him, in 2010, I’d kept track: He used to say that in 1941, he was killed by the Einsatzgruppen in Ternopil, Ukraine, even though he was eleven at the time, and busy eating sour cream on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. When he was seventeen, he volunteered for the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, fought bloody battles for Israel’s independence in the Judean hills, was shot in the leg, and died in the arms of a nun who quoted the second century rabbi Ben-Azzai in Germanic Hebrew. Later he moved to New York, was treated for his wounds in Mount Sinai Hospital, befriended Charlie Parker, kissed Billie Holiday, stayed for a decade, and died there when he gave up being a painter and returned home.
Back in Tel Aviv, he became one of Israel’s greatest and least celebrated writers, and with each of his seventeen novels and seven short-story collections he died of being neither loved nor read, died the slow and painful death of rejection, poverty, and obscurity. In the last fifteen years of his life, he made a regular habit of dying at Ichilov hospital from various kinds of cancers and their complications—viruses, strokes, infections, pneumonias. Most recently, he died there this past Saturday, following a last meal of oranges, which he loved, after a long and painful struggle with bone-marrow cancer". newyorker.