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Jacqueline Kahanoff

Jacqueline Kahanoff was an Egyptian-born Israeli novelist, essayist and journalist, known for her essay cycle "A Generation of Levantines" and her idea of Levantinism.

1917 to 1979The essays "A Generation of Levantines"The idea of LevantinismThe novel Jacob's Ladder

Born: 18 May 1917, Cairo
Died: 24 October 1979, Tel Aviv
Occupation: journalist, essayist, writer, novelist

Jacqueline Kahanoff was born in 1917 in Cairo

Jacqueline Shohet was born in Cairo in 1917. Her father, Joseph, was an Iraqi Jew, and her mother, Yvonne Chemla, was born in Egypt to Tunisian Jewish parents. She went to a French school and grew up speaking French, English and Arabic.

She moved to the United States with her first husband, Izzy Margoliash. After they divorced, she studied journalism at Columbia University in New York. There she began publishing short stories, and in 1951 she published the novel Jacob's Ladder.

In 1952 she married Alexander Kahanoff in Paris, and the couple later moved to Israel, first to Beersheba and then near Tel Aviv. In Israel she turned to journalism and personal essays. Aharon Amir published her essays in his journal Keshet and translated them into Hebrew.

Her essays presented Levantinism, a model of coexistence drawn from her childhood in Egypt. A collection of her essays appeared in 1978, and she died in 1979. Two more collections of her writing were published after her death, in 2005 and 2011.