Naomi Frankel
| Naomi Frankel | |
|---|---|
Frankel in 2004
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| Born |
20 November 1918 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | 20 November 2009 (aged 91) Hebron, West Bank |
| Resting place | Kibbutz Beit Alfa |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | Hebrew |
| Alma mater | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Period | 1956–2003 |
| Notable works | Saul and Joanna trilogy (1956–1967) |
| Notable awards | Ruppin Prize (1956) |
| Spouses | Yisrael Rosenzweig Meir Ben-Gur |
| Children | 1 |
Naomi Frankel (20 November 1918 – 20 November 2009), also spelled Fraenkel and Frenkel, was a German-Israeli novelist. Born in Berlin, she was evacuated to Mandatory Palestine with other German-Jewish children in 1933. She became a member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa, where she lived until 1970. She began writing novels in 1956 and achieved fame with her trilogy Shaul ve-Yohannah (Saul and Joanna), a three-generational tale of an assimilated German-Jewish family in prewar Germany. She wrote four other novels for adults as well as several books for children. In the 1980s Frankel abandoned her leftist convictions and adopted right-wing ideology, settling in the West Bank, where she died in 2009, aged 91.
Naomi Frankel was born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family in Berlin on 20 November 1918. Her mother died when she was two. Her father worked in textile manufacture. In her youth, she joined the Socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement. Her father died in 1932 and she was taken under the care of a guardian, who helped her escape Nazi Germany with other Jewish children who were evacuated by the community and sent to British-administered Mandatory Palestine in 1933.
Frankel initially lived in a girls' orphanage in Jerusalem. Then she moved to Beit Alfa, a leftist kibbutz in Northern Israel. She attended an agricultural school for girls and went on to study Jewish history and Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, she fought in the Palmach brigade.
After the 1948 war, Frankel divided her time between working on Kibbutz Beit Alfa and writing. She achieved fame with the publication of her first novel, Shaul ve-Yohannah (Saul and Joanna), the first part of a trilogy published between 1956 and 1967. The trilogy is a fictionalized account of three generations of an assimilated German-Jewish family whose granddaughter joins a Zionist youth movement. In depicting the rise and fall of prewar German-Jewish culture, Frankel concludes that only Zionism and a strong Jewish state can protect the Jewish people from persecution. One of the first books published in Israel that dealt with Jewish life in prewar Germany, Shaul ve-Yohannah aroused strong feelings among German-Jewish immigrants to Israel, and also met with critical success. Having returned to Berlin to do research for the first volume in the 1950s, in 1960 Frankel received a scholarship from the Anne Frank Foundation that enabled her to undertake an additional 18 months of research in Berlin for the second and third volumes.
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