Internationally Known Israeli Holocaust Author Passes Away
Award-winning Israeli author, Amir Gutfreund, passed away on Friday night, November 27, in his native city of Haifa after battling cancer. He was 52-years-old.
Gutfreund was born in the city of Haifa to Holocaust survivors and was considered one of Israel’s more successful contemporary writers.
He completed two degrees in the prestigious Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa in applied mathematics and operational research. He began writing novels while he was still an Academic Officer in the Israeli Air Force and was honorably discharged as a lieutenant colonel.
In 2001, Gutfreund’s debut novel, Our Holocaust, was awarded the international Buchman Memorial Prize for exemplary work in the field of the Holocaust.
In 2003 Gutfreund won the National Sapir Prize for Literature for his novel Ahuzot Hof(Seaside Estates) and in 2013 he was awarded the Prime Ministerial Levi Eshkol Prize for his creative works. His novels were translated into six languages including English, French and German.
In 2007, Gutfreund received the Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award by the United States’ Jewish Book Council which recognizes the unique role of contemporary writers in the transmission and examination of the Jewish experience.
In addition to writing novels, Gutfreund was also a writer for the popular Israeli television series Hatufim, which was adapted into an American drama, with rights bought by the US network, CBS, for a series called Hostages.
He is survived by a wife and three children from a previous marriage. In 2011, Gutfreund’s first wife, Neta Shamir, also passed away from cancer.
In a writers’ gathering in Tel Aviv two years ago, Gutfreund described the start of his writing career.
“I started writing when I was 17. Since then it became the central theme of my life, the rest was just things I had to complete so I can get back to writing,” Gutfreund stated.
“I did other things. I studies mathematics in the Technion, I had a 20-year military career, and allegedly I was ‘a serious man’. But earnestly, all I wanted to do was to write.”
