Amalia Kahana-Carmon

Amalia Kahana-Carmon (Hebrew: עמליה כהנא-כרמון) (18 October 1926 - 16 January 2019) was an author and literary critic who lived in Israel most of her life. She was awarded the Israel Prize for literature in 2000.

Interview (August 1977)
in Encounters with Israel Authors by Esther Fuchs (1982)


 * Each author has a unique style, all his own...I believe every author is unique and every work is too, due to its unique style.


 * Style is a part and parcel of the expression. I never “think out” devices. The device is a reflection of my psychic structure. It’s like my own voice. Part of it is the sound, the other part—my intonation.


 * A writer is a person who at a certain point in his life has found out that he is bothered by something which those around him seem to take in their stride. He finds out that here the usual modes of talk will not do, and he turns to investigate it the lonely way—on paper. It is doubtful if he is to find a solution to those pestering questions, but giving shape to his probings is itself a kind of solace. And then, something strange happens. The paper gets hold of him. It stimulates him, it becomes a meaning to itself. This person has passed a thin line into a new, a different world, to stay there forever. Forever, because not to obey this call now is tantamount to desertion, or still worse, to exile.


 * I think I am mostly concerned with two issues: death-in-life versus life, and chaos versus order. These two are clearly intertwined, of course. I am talking about the individual revolt against the established order of things, the attempt to break through the visible. This attempt brings about an epiphany of a wider order of things which underlies our existence.


 * Every story is a breakthrough. Every story is catching a glimpse of some vast, infinite pattern which gives meaning to our lives. Every story is an acceptance, a realization that the all-encompassing pattern is there for a purpose. But the unconscious attempt to disguise the pattern is infinite, so every story comes as a surprise.


 * My work is an expression of myself, and I happen to be Jewish, I guess my point of view is affected by a hierarchy of values which is bound up with this point in history, and this place in the world. And I guess there is no escape from my own point of view.


 * I have two sons in the military service, one in the Air Force and one in the Army. So nobody can be against war more than myself. But to tell the truth, during the day to day routine, doing the normal things, small or great, war hardly enters our thoughts. It becomes a fact of life. Almost like air pollution.


 * Every human encounter is the external embodiment of an attraction between two magnetic fields. The encounter comes suddenly, unexpectedly. It is a moment of truth. It is a moment of revelation, as when the right ray of sun penetrates through the right window pane, and falls with the right slant on one picture in the museum. This is the painfully short moment which shows us just what the artist had in mind. It happened to me once. I walked into a bookstore in Jerusalem. I opened one book after another, when suddenly I found myself reading something breathlessly. It was a book of poems by Pinhas Sadeh. There was a flash, I was touched by something powerful. For some reason, I could not purchase the book right away. A while later, back in Tel Aviv, I went to buy the book. When I opened it this time it was—difficult. The angle had changed. The ray of light passed me by. There was no illumination. The same happens with human encounters. We meet someone, and suddenly we are capable of being ourselves, just like we were supposed to be—ourselves without hiding, without pretending, with no pretexts. We are each a magnetic field. And each attraction, limited as it may appear to be, is a cosmic happening—it occurs within the broader pattern of things, within the endlessly complex structure which underlies our lives.


 * (What does the title of the story, “There, The Newsroom” mean?) A. K. -C. The essential news, the news which matters, is not in the newsroom but in the opposite direction. The things which shape our lives are not projected on the television screen.


 * Living in a world of flux, subjugated to the indecipherable laws of constant vicissitudes, our encounters cannot but be momentary flashes. The glamor cannot last because we change, the others change, circumstances change. So I wouldn’t call the end of a relationship a failure.


 * I wrote about the hard way in which one learns the pain of the break between dream and reality. And you know, in the beginning I tended to write, for lack of a better term, in the “romantic” vein. I was trying to search for human nature through the external order of things. I wanted to touch human misery without getting my hands dirty, out of a peculiar fastidiousness. I think I changed tremendously in this sense. I am not as much of an outsider anymore. I am more capable now of observing the pain, and being part of it at the same time. I have learned to come to terms with the “concrete” and naked reality and not flinch from expressing it in a more direct fashion.


 * After all, what are we trying to find in a book ? Ourselves. A good book offers you yourself in a more articulate way. Reading is actually plunging into one’s own identity and, one hopes, emerging stronger than before. You see, unconsciously, we are seeking to find an affirmation to our own world -perception and set of values. Since these change as we grow up and develop, our response to books changes as well. I don’t believe there is an objective yardstick by which a book may be evaluated. The “science” of literary criticism is an illusion—it is based on subjective impressions, and no one feels the sting more strongly than I, being a critic myself. The only thing I hope to do in my books, is to open up the reader to a new awareness. There is no logical or speculative message I intend to transmit. The “message” belongs to the realm of intuition, imagination and emotional perception. If I manage to make a reader sensitive to that special awareness which has inspired me to write, I consider myself a lucky writer.


 * I write when I cannot hold back any longer. Call it an attack, an ir­resistible impulse. In a way, my writing has almost been clandestine. There was a constant feeling of guilt, and a continuous tension between my duties at home and my literary aspirations.

Quotes about Amalia Kahana-Carmon

 * Her stories plunge the reader directly into an unmediated world of subjective feeling. Usually the subjects of her novels and stories are young women facing the problems of growing up and contending with romantic attachments. In a later novel, With Her on Her Way Home (1991), she deals with the problems of growing old. Kahana-Carmon's language is carefully shaped and unadorned, but possessing an idiosyncratic subtlety that makes translation difficult.
 * Glenda Abramson in The Oxford Book of Hebrew Short Stories (1996)


 * Amalia Kahana-Carmon is often described as the Israeli Virginia Woolf. Though she belongs to the age group of the Palmach generation of the fifties, she is normally classified as one of the “New Wave” writers on a par with A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz.
 * Esther Fuchs, Encounters with Israel Authors (1982)