page_title: Amos Kenan
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Amos Kenan / Life
caption_attribution_description: Lion (1993) by Amos kenan, 55/185/140 cm, stone. עמוס קינן, אריה (1993), 55/185/140 ס"מ.
context_page_description: Amos Kenan, also Amos Keinan, was an Israeli columnist, painter, sculptor, playwright and novelist.
context_section_description: Amos Kenan  was born Amos Levine in south Tel Aviv in 1927. His parents were secular socialists. His father was a Gdud HaAvoda veteran and construction worker. At one point, the family lived in Argentina for several years when his father took work there. When the family returned, his father was injured in a work accident and subsequently became a clerk. He was a member of Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. In 1946 he met the poet Yonatan Ratosh and joined Ratosh's Canaanite movement, which he remained identified with until the early 1950s. He was among the founders of the movement's magazine, "Alef", in which he published his first book in 1949.  Kenan dropped out of high school to become a factory worker.
  Kenan was a member of the Lehi underground. In 1989 he told The Guardian: "I joined because it was an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist organisation…We didn't fight the Arabs."  During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War he fought in the 8th Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces, under the command of Yitzhak Sadeh, and was wounded. During the war he met Uri Avnery, who became his friend and colleague.  Kenan took part in the Deir Yassin massacre  The Independent's Daphna Baram writes that Kenan's account of the attack on the village and his role in it varied over the course of his life. and the Al-Dawayima massacre, according to Ilan Pappe.  According to Avnery, Kenan "always asserted that the massacre was not intended, or that it did not take place at all…He himself was wounded at the beginning of the action, he asserted, and did not see what happened."
  From April 1950 until June 1952, Kenan wrote a satirical column in Haaretz called "Uzi & Co.", succeeding  Benjamin Tammuz, who had started the column in 1948. "Uzi & Co.", regarded as the first anti-establishment column in Israel, took particular aim at the religious establishment. In 1952, Kenan was arrested, along with his friend and former Lehi colleague Shaltiel Ben-Yair, in connection with an assassination attempt on Israeli Transportation Minister, David-Zvi Pinkas, in the wake of Pinkas' decision to shut down public transportation on Shabbat.  The two were arrested as they were leaving Pinkas' home, but said nothing under interrogation and were acquitted by the district court for lack of evidence. However, Haaretz publisher Gershom Schocken terminated his column.  Kenan eventually told his wife, Nurith Gertz, as well as close friends and colleagues,  that he really was involved in the bombing.  In 2008 Gertz published a biography of Kenan in which she states this.  He began writing for  Tarzan Magazine under a pen name.  In 1952 Kenan's "Uzi & Co." columns were collected in his first book, "With Whips and Scorpions."
  From 1954 to 1962, Kenan lived in Paris, where he worked as a sculptor and published several plays drawing on the theater of the absurd.  Pierre Alechinsky illustrated two of his books and Maurice Béjart adapted his plays, which were mounted in Paris and Switzerland. During that time he wrote a column for Avnery's magazine Haolam Hazeh, called "The Wandering Knife", and a column called "Sparks from the city of lights" for Yediot Aharonot. His writing was translated into French by his partner, Christiane Rochefort. Rochefort's first novel, Warrior's Rest, was inspired by Kenan. In Paris Kenan participated in meetings between Arabs and Israelis (mostly Communists, although Kenan was not) arranged by the Egyptian Communist emigre Henri Curiel. He also arranged a meeting between himself, Avnery, and Jean-Paul Sartre in which Sartre (in Avnery's account) praised the Israeli left.  Kenan was a member of Avnery's political group Semitic Action.
  He returned to Israel in 1962 and began writing a weekly column in Yediot Aharonot that ran for forty years. In 1962, Kenan married Nurit Gertz, a literary scholar. They had two daughters, the journalist Shlomzion Kenan and the poet and singer/songwriter Rona Kenan. He was also the paper's food critic. He edited a newspaper named "Tzipor HaNefesh" ("The bird of the soul") with Dahn Ben-Amotz, and contributed articles to The
caption: "Lion" (1992)
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