Zvi Kolitz

Zvi Kolitz (Hebrew: צבי קוליץ‎‎; December 14, 1912 – September 29, 2002) was a Lithuanian-born Jewish film and theatrical producer and a writer whose short story Yosl Rakover Talks to God became a classic of Holocaust literature.

Zvi Kolitz, a son of a prominent rabbinical family, was born in Alytus, Lithuania. He studied at the nearby Yeshiva of Slobodka and then lived for several years in Italy, where he attended the University of Florence and the Naval Academy at Civitavecchia. He emigrated to Palestine before the Israeli War of Independence and led recruiting efforts for the Zionist Revisionist movement. He was arrested by the British and jailed for his political activities. After Israel's independence in 1948, Kolitz became active in the state's literary and cultural life. In 2002, Kolitz died of natural causes in New York, NY.

Kolitz is best known for Yosl Rakover Talks to God, a short story he wrote in 1946 for a Jewish newspaper in Buenos Aires. In the story, set in the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto, a pious Jew challenges God. And so, my God, before I die, freed from all fear, beyond all terror, in a state of absolute inner peace and trust, I will allow myself to call you to account one last time in my life, the fictionalized Rakover says, adding later I believe in the God of Israel, even when he has done everything to make me cease to believe in him.

A few years after it was published, the story was translated into English and Hebrew but without Kolitz's name as the author. It was passed on as an authentic testimony of the Warsaw Ghetto and ended up in several Holocaust anthologies and even as a meditation in Jewish prayer books.

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