Hanoch Bartov

Hanoch Bartov
חנוך ברטוב
Hanoch Bartov
Born	Hanoch Helfgott (1926-08-13)August 13, 1926 Petah Tikva, Mandatory Palestine
Died	December 13, 2016(2016-12-13) (aged 90) Tel Aviv, Israel
Occupations	Author, journalist
Notable work	The Brigade, Everyone Had Six Wings
Awards	Israel Prize (2010), Bialik Prize (1985), Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Literary Works (1974 and 2007)

Hanoch Bartov (Hebrew: חנוך ברטוב; 13 August 1926 – 13 December 2016) was an Israeli author and journalist.

Biography

Hanoch Helfgott (Bartov) was born in Petah Tikva in 1926, a year after his parents immigrated from Poland. He attended a religious school and then Ahad HaAm High School. After working in diamond polishing and welding for two years, he enlisted in the British Army in 1943 at age 17 during World War II. He spent three years in the British Army, serving in the Palestine Regiment and subsequently as a medic in the Jewish Brigade, during which he participated in the Italian campaign. He took part in combat operations before being deployed to the Netherlands and caring for Holocaust survivors in DP camps. He returned to Palestine in 1946.

Bartov published his first story in 1945, when he was a 19-year-old soldier in Europe. In his writing, as a journalist and novelist, Bartov describes his first contacts with survivors of the Holocaust. His novel The Brigade is a fictionalized account of the Jewish Brigade.

After World War II, Bartov studied Jewish and general history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War he served in the Israel Defense Forces as a machine gun team commander in the Etzioni Brigade. He fought on the Jerusalem front and was wounded. He lived for four years on Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, working as a farmhand and a teacher. In 1955, he moved to Tel Aviv. From 1966 to 1968, Bartov served as a cultural advisor at the Israeli embassy in London. He wrote a regular opinion column in the Maariv newspaper for 20 years.

Bartov married Yehudit Shimmer in 1946. They had two children, Omer and Gilat. Yehudit died in 1998. In 2016, three weeks before his death, he married Michal Oron, a professor of Hebrew literature and Jewish mysticism.

Awards

Bartov received the following prizes for his work:

• The Ussishkin Prize in 1955.
• The Shlonsky Prize in 1965.
• The Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Literary Works in 1974 and again in 2007.
• The Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for Military Literature in 1978.
• The Bialik Prize for literature in 1985.
• The President's Prize for Literature in 1998.
• The Agnon Prize and Buchman Prize in 2006.
• The Yehuda Amichai-ACUM Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2007.
• The Israel Prize for literature in 2010.

In addition, Bartov was awarded an honorary doctorate by Tel Aviv University in 2005.

Works

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients

References