Hanoch Levine
| Hanoch Levin | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 18, 1943 |
| Died | August 18, 1999 (aged 55) |
| Citizenship | Israeli |
| Alma mater | Tel Aviv University |
| Occupation | Dramatist, theater director, author, and poet |
| Home town | Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Awards | 1994 Bialik Prize for literature |
Hanoch Levin (December 18, 1943 – August 18, 1999; Hebrew חנוך לוין), was a prominent Israeli dramatist, theater director, author and poet, best known for his theater plays.
Hanoch Levin was born in 1943 to Malka and Israel Levin, who immigrated to then-Mandatory Palestine in 1935 from Łódź, Poland. He grew up in a religious home in the Neve Sha'anan neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv. His father ran a grocery store.
As a child, he attended the Yavetz State Religious School. In the 1950s, his brother, David, who was nine years older than he was, worked as an assistant director at the Cameri Theater. His father died of a heart attack when he was 12 years old. Hanoch attended Zeitlin Religious High School in Tel Aviv. After ninth grade, he left school to help support the family. He worked as a messenger boy for the Herut company and took classes at a night school for working youth at the Ironi Aleph middle school. There he joined a drama club and acted in Michal, Daughter of Saul by Aharon Ashman.
After serving his compulsory military duty as a code clerk in the signal corps, Levin began to study philosophy and Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University (1964–67). In 1965 he joined the editorial board of the Dorban newspaper, one of the university's two student newspapers. Some passages from the period were republished, with thorough revisions, as part of his later work. For example, "A Hardened Ballad of a Soldier Man and Woman" from June 1966 was revised as "Black Eagle on a Red Roof" and published after the 1982 Lebanon War.
During his university studies, Levin associated with the Communist Party, where he met Danny Tracz, the dramatist of the Communist youth. A friendship and professional kinship developed between the two that lasted beyond the period of their party activities.
In 1967, Levin published a poem called "Birkot ha-Shahar" (the name of the Jewish "dawn blessings") in the literary journal Yochani, and was met with critical acclaim. The poem was later reprinted in his poetry collection Life of the Dead. In Haaretz he published the stories "Stubborn Dina" (1966) and "Pshishpsh" (1971, also published in the book The Eternal Invalid and the Beloved), as well as the verse cycles "Party Song of the Wicked: An Idyll" (1968, later appeared in Life of the Dead) and "Flawed People" (1970). Following Meir Wieseltier's invitations, he began in 1971 to publish stories, poems, and verse in the literary journal Exclamation Point (סימן קריאה): "The World of the Sycophantes" in 1973, "A Hunchback Finds a Prostitute" in 1976, "Life of the Dead" in 1981, and others.
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