Ephraim Kishon, 80
A world away from Jackie Mason's borscht-belt jokes and Seinfeld's have-you-ever-noticed? brand of comedy, Ephraim Kishon pointed his satiric wit not at his navel, but to a nascent Israel. In the process, he helped shape that beleaguered nation's consciousness for years to come.
Born either Ferenc Kishont or Ferenc Hoffmann in Budapest in 1924, Kishon survived the Nazi horror by escaping from a train en route to the Sobibor concentration camp, one of the worst death-holes in Poland.
"They made a mistake." Kishon later famously wrote. "They left one satirist alive."
He arrived in Israel in the tempestuous year of 1949, penniless and speaking no Hebrew. He soon changed his name and began learning the Holy Tongue, which was to become the scathing vehicle for his genius. In his myriad books, newspaper columns, plays and movies, Kishon took his adopted homeland to task for just about everything. A more sensitive, less self-hating Karl Kraus, Kishon also had a bit of the prophet in him. Think a Jeremiah with a gentle setup and a punchline so harsh it could stand in for the Apocalypse itself.
Social justice, identity politics, moral stewardship of the Middle East were among Kishon's favorite topics, all filtered through a world-weary absurdity that came from somewhere beyond Israel-indeed, from Eastern Europe. Among his greatest targets was the native-born Israeli, the so-called Sabra-named after a prickly fruit, tough on the outside, sweet within-and the anxiety they felt with each new wave of immigration (European, Moroccan, Ethiopian, Russian). His play on these themes, 1964's Salah Shabati (later made into an award-winning movie starring Topol of Fiddler on the Roof fame), was a huge hit with a modern, almost Ionesco-styled surface that nonetheless mined the depths of self-deprecating Jewish humor.
Indeed, the irony in Kishon's work was nested in an irony greater. When his work was translated in the 70s, Kishon found that most of his audience was in Europe-Germany in particular. At the time, it seemed that Israel had had enough of him, but that didn't stop Ariel Sharon from describing him as "one of the cultural giants of our generation."
Kishon was destined to live on the Continent, though he always retained Hebrew as his language and still hurled his barbs throughout Israel-though now from the other side of the Mediterranean.
His death on Jan. 29 comes at a crucial time for world Jewry. With the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation upon us and the current promise of a Middle East peace bid, Israelis might hope that the need for people like Kishon will soon be tempered. If so, they've responded only to his politics.
In a final irony that Kishon would have loved to write about, his body was flown from Switzerland to Israel last week, to be buried in the land that gave him a home, but-until now-never a moment's rest.