Unrepentant

Amos Kenan, journalist, writer, playwright, painter, freedom fighter, peace activist, drinker and wild child born to a crazy father in an equally crazy country, never stopped criticizing the society he lived in. A lonely boy, then man, whose dreams slowly crumbled, one after the other. This book follows Kenan through four main periods of his life: his childhood in Tel Aviv; his turbulent activity in Lehi, an armed Zionist underground faction in Mandatory Palestine, followed by fighting in Israel’s War of Independence; and finally, exile during the 50s in Paris—and in the arms of Christiane Rochefort—where he sought the cosmopolitical homeland he was never to find.

Nurith Gertz, literary scholar, cultural critic and the woman who stood at Kenan’s side for 45 years, until his recent death, has taken on the complex task of writing these chapters of his life. Blending documentation of historical events with her protagonists’ writing and letters, Unrepentant gives access to the mind and soul of one of the most talented, lively and complicated Israelis in history.