Benjamin Tammuz

Benjamin Tammuz was born in 1919 in Kharkiv

Benjamin Tammuz was born in Kharkiv in 1919 to Yosef and Shifra Kamerstein. At age 5 he moved with his parents to the Land of Israel, and they settled in Tel Aviv. His father died when he was 8, and this loss later appeared in his writing.

He attended the Tachkemoni school and the Herzliya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv. He wrote, sculpted and painted from a young age, and later studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. As a young man he belonged to the Communist underground and then to the Canaanite movement, and the artist Yitzhak Danziger influenced him. In time he moved away from Canaanite ideas.

In 1948 he joined the editorial board of Haaretz, where he wrote a column and then edited the children's paper Haaretz Shelanu. From 1965 he edited the paper's literary and cultural supplement and served as its art critic. He also translated plays and books into Hebrew and edited books on Israeli art.

From 1971 to 1975 he was cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy in London. From 1979 to 1984 he was a writer in residence at Oxford University. Several of his novels, including Minotaur, appeared in English.

He and his wife Miriam had 2 sons, Onn and Jonathan, and Jonathan made a film of Minotaur. He was widowed in 1985. He died in Tel Aviv in 1989 and was buried in Holon.