Galila Ron-Feder-Amit, born in Haifa in 1949, is one of Israel’s most prolific and influential authors. With nearly 400 published books – most of them for children and young adults – she has shaped the reading lives of generations of Israeli youth.
A graduate of the Hebrew University in Hebrew Literature and Bible Studies, Ron-Feder-Amit showed her passion for storytelling early. As a child, she filled roughly 700 notebooks that never saw publication, and by age nine, she was already writing adventure stories. She studied biology at Haifa’s prestigious Reali school, but it was literature that would define her life.
Despite coming from a family with strong Mapai sympathies, she was captivated as a teenager by the stories of Jabotinsky and the Irgun (known in Hebrew as Etzel) and Lehi undergrounds. She spent four years writing a story about a girl in love with an Irgun member, and boldly sent the draft to Menachem Begin – then a minister in the government – who ended up inviting her to meet him. Though the book was never published, the encounter sparked a lasting friendship. Begin was her greatest champion, and their lifelong bond eventually led her to write a historical novel about him.
To herself
Ron-Feder-Amit’s breakthrough came with the 1974 story “To Myself,” serialized in a weekly children’s magazine. The story follows Zion Cohen, a boy from the northern city of Beit She’an with a criminal father and a drug-addicted mother, who is sent to a foster family in Haifa. “To Myself” became a phenomenon and inspired a series of books about the main character and spin-off series about other characters from the book. “To Myself” was translated into nine languages, adapted into a feature film, a stage play, a radio series, and a TV series.
Ron-Feder-Amit used her enormous popularity to tackle subjects long considered taboo in Israeli children’s literature, including drug use, sexuality, and family dysfunction. Many of her books are realistic, contemporary stories centering on young people who must find the strength to overcome hardship.
Today, Galila Ron-Feder-Amit remains perhaps the most important writer of youth fiction in Israel – a storyteller who never underestimated her readers and equipped them with tools to tackle the difficult task of growing up in a less-than-perfect society.
Main Photo: Galila Ron Feder Amit by Yaakov\ Wikipedia
