Icchokas Meras

Icchokas Meras (8 October 1934 – 13 March 2014) was a Lithuanian writer.

Biography

Meras was born in 1934 to Jehuda and Miriam Meras in a Jewish family in Kelmė, Lithuania, which contained one of the country's notable Jewish communities. His family perished in 1941 when the Nazis undertook the liquidation of Lithuania's Jews, but young Icchokas escaped the Holocaust. "On July 28, 1941, I was being taken to a ditch to be shot," he wrote later. "Due to chance, they decided to return some of the children. Due to another chance, I fell in with people who valued the life of a seven-year old child."

Hidden and adopted by a Lithuanian peasant family, Meras survived the war. In the violent and troubled post-war years Meras attended secondary school and soon revealed an inclination towards writing when he came to work for a local newspaper in Kelmė.

In 1958 he graduated from the Kaunas Polytechnic Institute with a degree in radio electronics, but began devoting most of his spare time to literature. In 1960 Meras published his first collection of stories entitled ''Geltonas lopas'' (The Yellow Patch). He based his sketches on his own childhood experiences of Holocaust terror. In 1963 Meras published two works: ''Žemė visada gyva'' (The Earth is Always Alive) and his best-known work internationally, ''Lygiosios trunka akimirką'' (A Stalemate Lasts But a Moment). In 1965 Meras published another novel, ''Ant ko laikosi pasaulis'' (What the World Rests On). In 1971 there followed ''Mėnulio savaitė'' (The Week of the Moon) and ''Senas fontanas'' (The Old Fountain). In 1971 Meras presented his darkly existentialist novel ''Striptizas, arba Paryžius — Roma — Paryžius'' (Striptease or Paris-Rome-Paris). This work was published in literary monthly magazine ''Pergalė'' and was roundly criticised by Communist party officials.

Under increasing pressure from the KGB authorities for his literary "deviations," he emigrated from Lithuania to Israel in 1972 where he lived until his death.Saulius Sužiedelis. ''Icchokas Meras and the Holocaust: terror and salvation in contemporary Lithuanian literature''. Lituanus, Volume 27, No.3 - Fall 1981, Editor Saulius Sužiedelis, ISSN 0024-5089.
/ref>

Awards and recognition

* : Lithuanian National Prize (2010).
* : Commander's Cross of the Order of Gediminas (1995)

References

External links

*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Meras, Icchokas
Lithuanian male writers
Lithuanian novelists
Lithuanian short story writers
Lithuanian Jews
Israeli novelists
Recipients of the Lithuanian National Prize
Kaunas University of Technology alumni
Holocaust survivors
People from Kelmė
Lithuanian screenwriters
Male screenwriters
1934 births
2014 deaths
20th-century novelists
Commander's Crosses of the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas
20th-century short story writers