“A Culture Stillborn”: The Birth of Levantine Literature

Jacqueline Kahanoff (born Shohet) was an Egyptian-born novelist, essayist, and journalist. She was born in Cairo to a Tunisian mother and an Iraqi father who owned a department store. Kahanoff moved to the United States in 1940, earning a journalism degree from Columbia University. She published the novel Jacob’s Ladder in 1951, three years before she moved to Israel; in Israel she turned to essays and reflective writings. Her mainly English-language works (which were published in Hebrew translation in Israel) drew on her experiences in Egypt in the interwar period, and she is credited with the theory of Levantinism, envisioning multicultural societies in the Middle East.