Background

Moshe Shamir was born on September 15, 1921, in Safed, Israel. He was a son of Arie Shamir and Ella Shamir, maiden name Aronshohn. He was raised in Tel Aviv.

Education

Moshe Shamir attended the Tel Nordau School and graduated from the Herzliya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv. As a teenager, he joined Hashomer Hatza'ir (or Young Guard), the radical youth movement.

Career

Moshe Shamir lived for six years on Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek and, after 1941, fought as a captain in the Palmach, the elite force of the Haganah militia, which played a pivotal role in the 1948 Israeli war of independence. He was elected to the Knesset as a member of the Likud in 1977-1981. In 1979, he founded Tehiya Party.

Shamir's works directly tackle issues of modern Israeli society through various stages. His early fiction, written immediately before and after the establishment of the State, focuses on the pioneering spirit that was felt essential to realizing the Zionist dream. Shamir's later work becomes both more questioning and more critical of Israeli norms. His historical novels, written in the 1950s, are metaphors for modern problems of leadership as well as character studies of individuals such as Alexander Yannai of the Hasmonean era and King David. Other contemporary and later works dwell on problems of class and social structure in Israel, issues in kibbutz life, and emptiness of Israeli values.

As early as 1939, Shamir was writing idiosyncratic critiques of kibbutz life, themes he developed mostly in children's books. His first major work was Hu Halach Ba-Sadot (He Walks In The Fields), released. It takes place on a kibbutz in the 1940s and tells the story of a native-born kibbutznik and his family. Within the context of the story is the Jewish theme of the Aqedah, the biblical story in which Abraham, at the request of God, is going to sacrifice his son Isaac. Shamir's handling of them takes both an idealistic view of Israeli society and a realistic view. The story focuses on a family in a kibbutz and ends tragically with the death of a son during military training and the breakup of a family - both serve as metaphors for the larger notion of the kibbutz and the Jewish community.

By the late 1950s, Shamir's work was less idealistic in terms of how he viewed the Israeli world. Even his historical novels about past leaders of the Jewish people contain strong metaphorical elements relating to the modem issues of Israeli leadership. In The King of Flesh and Blood Shamir presents a fictionalized account of Alexander Yannai, a Jewish leader during the Hasmonean era. The book focuses on the first five years after Yannai becomes king of Judea (c. 103 B.C.). Shamir said that The King of Flesh and Blood "reflects my basic attitude to the subject of time: the notion of total identification with the past, denial of a rupture between past and present, and active awareness of our national existence, so encompassing and significant that it embraces everything from our forefather Abraham until the messianic age." David Patterson, who translated The King of Flesh and Blood from the Hebrew, also noted in an essay in Israeli Writers Consider the "Outsider" that Shamir was "faced with the formidable problem of writing convincingly about ancient periods in Israel's history," especially in terms of "attempting to create a stratum of language strikingly reminiscent of postbiblical Hebrew."

In David's Stranger, Shamir focuses on a period one thousand years before the time of The King of Flesh and Blood. Shamir noted that "this is a highly subjective book, with no proclivity or pretense whatever of being a historical account." In the book, he addressed the issue of the reader as the judge when the first-person narrator says to the reader, "I can't render judgment. You're the clever one who knows. You can judge." The story focuses on Uriah, a man torn between the love for his wife and the love for his king. Shamir describes him as a "sacrificial victim in every sense of the word."

His Own Hands featured a character based on Shamir's brother, who had been killed in the 1948 war. The Border decried eroding ethical mores; to the literary expert Leon Yudkin, it marked "a restless search for freedom - a flight from the imposition of collective values on the individual."

Moshe Shamir took part in symposiums with Arab writers, highlighted the plight of slum-dwellers, and lambasted Israel's rulers for abandoning their socialist ideals. Hence the shock of his rightist volte-face, amplified in his political autobiography, My Life With Ishmael. Shamir was also literary editor of the mass-circulation Israeli daily, Ma'ariv. In 1948, he founded and, until 1950, edited Ba-Machaneh (In The Camp), the underground journal of the Haganah, and later of the Israel defense forces. He was the author of plays, including Meagadot Lod, Gam Zu Letova, Halayla leish, A Home in Good Condition, Judith of the Lepers, The Strong Hand, and Carnival in Venice. At about the age of eighty, Shamir saw the publication of his 2001 biographical novel Ya'ir, Avraham Shtern.

Achievements

• Both for the volume of his work and for its direct confrontation with issues of Israeli society, Moshe Shamir is considered one of the most important writers of Israeli literature. He wrote 52 Hebrew novels, plays, and collections of short stories and essays. His works were translated into Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Bulgarian, German, Portuguese, and Dutch. Shamir has received many awards for his novels.

Works

More photos

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  • The Fifth Wheel

    (The book follows the adventures and misadventures of Kolb...)

    1961
  • With His Own Hands

    (The book is a good depiction of life in Israel circa and ...)

    1970
  • David's Stranger 1965
  • The King Of Flesh And Blood 1958
  • The Hittite Must Die 1978
  • My Life With Ishmael 1970
  • Reuben Hecht: Vision and fulfillment 1995

Politics

Moshe Shamir, who lived for six years on the Kibbutz Mish-mar Ha'emek, had long been a proponent of the "Greater Land of Israel" ideology, which focused on Jewish sovereignty over the entire Israeli territories occupied after 1967 and the idea of further settling the land. In his early fiction, Shamir wrote about the important issues and themes that preoccupied Israelis before the official establishment of the State of Israel and then about the issues facing a growing nation. After the Six-Day War, Shamir's left-wing political views were radically transformed, and he became a strong proponent of a "Greater Land of Israel" ideology. He was elected to the Knesset as a member of the Likud Party in 1977-1981, but he left the party over the decision to return the Sinai to Egypt and was one of the founders of the right-wing Tehiya (Renaissance) Party. An active member of the underground during the Israeli war of independence, he created the movement's newsletter, Ba-mahaneh.

Views

Moshe Shamir championed the socialist ideals of kibbutz life in his novels. Credited with forging the national myth of the sabra, the native-born Palestinian Jewish, his earliest works articulated their hopes and fears, triumphs and failings. Shamir could seem like an unhinged Jeremiah in public. He charged leftists with "rupturing essential arteries" between Israel and the diaspora, religious and secular, Oriental and Ashkenazi Jewish. In October 1995, he likened Yitzhak Rabin's peace deal with the Palestinians to "collaborating with Nazi officers." A fortnight later, the then prime minister was murdered. After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Shamir predicted a looming world war against "Islamic-Arab civilization" itself.

Personality

Moshe Shamir was affable and modest in person.

Connections

Moshe Shamir married Zvia Frumkin on June 6, 1946. They had three children: Ennula, Yael, Elyahu.

Father:

Arie Shamir

Mother:

Ella Shamir

child:

Ennula Shamir

child:

Yael Shamir

child:

Elyahu Shamir

Wife:

Zvia Frumkin