Hanoch Bartov

Hanoch Bartov was born in 1926 in Petah Tikva

Hanoch Bartov was born Hanoch Helfgott in Petah Tikva in 1926. His parents had come from Poland about a year before his birth. He went to a religious school and then to Ahad HaAm High School.

After two years of work in diamond polishing and welding, he joined the British Army in 1943. He served in the Palestine Regiment and later as a medic in the Jewish Brigade in Italy and the Netherlands. His first story appeared in 1945, while he was still a soldier.

He then studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the War of Independence he commanded a machine gun team in the Etzioni Brigade and was wounded on the Jerusalem front. Later he lived on Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, where he taught and worked in farming.

In Tel Aviv he worked as a journalist and later wrote for Maariv. From 1966 to 1968 he was cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy in London. He wrote novels, story collections, travel books and plays, and his novel The Brigade tells a fictional story of the Jewish Brigade.

His wife Yehudit died in 1998, and they had two children. In 2016 he married Michal Oron, a professor of Hebrew literature. He died on 13 December 2016.