Ephraim Kishon

Ephraim Kishon (Hebrew: אפרים קישון‎; 23 August 1924 – 29 January 2005) was a Hungarian-born Israeli author, dramatist, screenwriter, and Oscar-nominated film director. A Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Israel in 1949, he became the young state's leading satirist, writing a daily satirical column, "Chad Gadya", in the newspaper Ma'ariv for about 30 years and publishing dozens of books, many translated into 37 languages. Kishon expanded into filmmaking in the 1960s, writing and directing five feature films; Sallah Shabati (1964) and The Policeman (1971) were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won Golden Globe Awards in the category. His films and characters, along with his writing, are credited with shaping Israeli popular culture and helping give rise to the Bourekas film genre. He was also a lifelong chess enthusiast whose passion for the game inspired a talking chess computer, the Kishon Chesster. His work was especially celebrated in West Germany and Austria, where in 1990 he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Although Kishon was one of the most widely read satirists in Israel, he came to feel that the Israeli literary establishment looked down on his popular style, and his domestic acclaim waned somewhat in the 1970s even as his books topped the bestseller lists in West Germany and Austria, where his reception became the subject of later academic study. He received the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement in 2002. Kishon died in Switzerland in 2005 at the age of 80.