PRAGUE (JTA) — Israeli writer, journalist and translator Ruth Bondy, a Holocaust survivor, returned to her birthplace to receive a prestigious literary award.
Bondy appeared in person to accept the Jiri Theiner Award at Book World Prague, which took place May 17-20.
The Prague native, born in 1923, was sent to Terezin when the Germans began deporting Jews, and later to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. Bondy and her sister were the only members of her immediate family to survive. Upon returning to Prague, Bondy joined a Zionist youth group planning to immigrate to Palestine.
In 1948, following the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Bondy moved to Israel, where she worked as a journalist for the Davar newspaper. She eventually turned her literary skills toward writing books.
The Jiri Theiner Award was established last year and is given to one who has promoted Czech literature internationally, which Bondy has done as a translator. Among the authors Bondy has translated into Hebrew are Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal and Jiri Weil, as well as Jaroslav Hasek’s classic "The Good Soldier Schweik."
