Isaac David Knafo was a writer, artist, and activist born in Mogador, Morocco, and educated in Paris. A prominent cultural figure in Morocco, Knafo was well known among the intelligentsia of Mogador for his first book, Les jeux et les rimes and later for his anti-Nazi pamphlet Les Hitlériques. The laws of the Vichy regime increasingly affected the rights and liberties of Jews in Morocco; in 1942, at the urging of the Jewish community, Knafo burned all the available copies of the pamphlet. A sole surviving exemplar was discovered in 1995. Knafo became an active member of the Zionist movement, immigrating to Israel in 1956 and settling on kibbutz Ramat ha-Kovesh. In Israel, he continued publishing poems, stories, and memoirs and exhibited a collection of one hundred paintings in 1973.
For the past four years I had not seen the morning sun. The newspaper work generally ended about three o’clock in the morning and who can go to sleep right after work? After work one…
Arnold Böcklin is dead—yet who among you knew that he lived? If I were to tell you that he was the man who knew how, with paintbrush dipped in colors upon a piece of canvas, to shake every heart…
Over and over, when the wayside dust had grayed us,
And we came and knocked at another’s door,
He threatened us with his fist and gainsaid us:
This is not your place! Move on!
Over and over.
Over…