Between Life and Death

In Between Life and Death Kaniuk describes the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the world of the living and that of the dead. This book is a literary attempt to penetrate the author`s lost consciousness, to answer the question of what led him to fight for his life and hold onto it with such desperate stubbornness. With rare sincerity and great courage, Kaniuk goes back to his own death throes and reprieve, as well as to the way stations of his life. With his unique style and rich language, this story shifts between memory and illusion, imagination and testimony. Events and people-some real and some not-blend into a vast fresco, a larger-than-life story about life itself. As in previous books, Kaniuk inquires into the place of death in society, the human lust for life and relationships between human beings, among whom we find soldiers in battle, friends and family.

Kaniuk also writes about the Jewish people, the Holocaust survivors in his childhood neighborhood, heroic stories and battles on which he was raised and the 1948 War of Independence in which he fought. This book, in which the author announces his rebirth at the age of seventy-four, is Kaniuk`s literary testament, and in it we find a vibrant dialogue with many of his earlier works.