S. Yizhar

S. Yizhar was born in 1916 in Rehovot

Yizhar Smilansky was born in 1916 into a family of writers. His father Zev Smilansky was a writer, and the writer Moshe Smilansky was his great-uncle. He went to the Balfour school in Tel Aviv, and the family later returned to Rehovot.

He trained as a teacher at the Beit Hakerem seminary in Jerusalem and taught in Yavniel, Ben Shemen and Rehovot. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War he was an intelligence officer. In 1942 he married Noemi Wellman, and they had 3 children.

In 1938 the poet Yitzhak Lamdan published his first story and gave him the pen name S. Yizhar. His 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh told of the expulsion of Arab villagers in the 1948 war, and in 1964 it entered the high school curriculum. In the late 1950s he published Days of Ziklag in 2 volumes.

He sat in the Knesset for Mapai from 1949, and in 1965 he moved to Rafi. He resigned from the Knesset in 1967. In July 1964 he submitted a bill on protected natural assets, which passed that year.

After a long literary silence he published the novel Mikdamot in 1992, followed by more books. His last work, Gilui Eliahu, appeared in 1999. He taught education at university and at Levinsky College, and died in 2006.