The Brigade

Hanoch Bartov was born in Petaḥ Tikvah the year after his parents immigrated to Palestine from Poland. At age seventeen, he joined the Jewish Brigade of the British army as a medic, helping Holocaust survivors to recover. He subsequently served in the Haganah and then the Israel Defense Forces from 1947 to 1949. After the war, he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before beginning his career as a writer. His journalism and fiction drew on his wartime experiences in both Europe and Israel. In the 1960s, he acted as the attaché for cultural affairs at the Israeli embassy in London. He received the Israel Prize in 2010 for his contributions to literature.