Aunt Joya

Born in Jerusalem, Yehuda Burla descended from a long line of Sephardic rabbis and scholars who had been living in Palestine since the sixteenth century. After completing a traditional yeshivah education, Burla attended David Yellin’s Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem and reoriented his aspirations toward the nontraditionalist cultural and political vision of the Zionist movement and the new Hebraist society emerging under its aegis. In 1913, he began to write Hebrew fiction, though his first story, “Luna,” was not published until 1919. After serving as an interpreter in the Ottoman army during World War I, Burla worked in Damascus as the director of Hebrew schools; he later returned to Palestine, where he was a teacher in Haifa and Tel Aviv. Burla continued to write Hebrew novels and stories throughout his life. He was awarded the Israel Prize for his writing in 1961.