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Grigory Kanovich, award-winning author who chronicled Lithuanian Jewry, dies at 93
(JTA) — Grigory Kanovich, a Lithuanian-born Jew and award winning author who endeavored to tell the story of his people despite Soviet pressure, died on Friday at 93 in his home in Tel Aviv.
Kanovich’s repertoire includes more than 30 plays and screenplays, a dozen novels and several collections of poems and short stories, almost all of which are devoted to stories of Lithuanian Jews.
Kanovich was born in 1929 in the shtetl of Janova, an almost entirely Jewish village just north of Kaunas, which was the capital of independent Lithuania in the interwar period. In his youth, the city was home to over 3,000 Jews, 80% of its population. There were hundreds of Jewish-owned shops, a Jewish bank and several synagogues and Jewish schools. Over 2,100 of Janova’s Jews were murdered in a series of massacres in the summer of 1941.
Karnovich’s family were among the lucky ones and escaped during the brief period of Soviet Occupation in between the Russian-German non-aggression pact in 1939 and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The family went east through Latvia and deeper into Soviet-controlled Central Asia, where they rode out the war.
When the war ended, Kanovich returned to the region of his youth to study at the University of Vilnius, but the world he knew there was forever gone. From as early as 1949, he began to put his thoughts about that loss down onto paper, both eulogizing the world of Lithuania Jewry and documenting the new Soviet Jewish reality.
Though he wrote largely in Russian, his works weaved the Talmudic thought of Lithuania’s yeshivas with the Yiddish wit that remained a part of Soviet comedy long after the Holocaust.
“Kanovich wrote about the fate of the Jewish people, about their relationship with Lithuanian and Russian culture. At the center of his works is the ‘little man,’ who stubbornly opposes evil and for the author embodies a person in general,” Wolfgang Kazak, a German Slavicist, once said of Kanovich’s work.
Kanovich’s first trilogy of novels, written between 1974 and 1979, and based on short stories he wrote in 1959 and 1967, was written through the eyes of a young yeshiva student navigating the Holocaust.
“Kanovich wrote about tragedy, but about the tragedy of people who, even in the face of inevitable death, did not lose either their dignity or a sense of belonging to their people and their civilization,” wrote Vitaly Portnikov, a Ukrainian journalist and editor, in a tribute for Radio Svoboda, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian service. “He took us back to biblical times, to the times of parables and prophets. We, his readers, felt human, we felt strong. We felt like we were in flight,”
The themes of Kanovich’s work, such as nostalgia for a past steeped in religiosity and struggle against assimilation, limited the reach of his work in the Soviet Union; it was only permitted to be published within the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, where he lived. Still, it became beloved by Jews throughout the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Kanovich was briefly elected president of the Jewish community in newly-independent Lithuania, but like so many other Eastern European Jews, he chose to immigrate to Israel in the 1990s. There he kept writing, continuing to tell the story of the Lithuanian shtetl, with work being published as recently as 2019.
“He was a stranger to Russian writers because he wrote about Jews. And he was a stranger to Jewish writers, because he wrote about those Jews whom Soviet literature did not want to know and notice – about the Jews of the Book and deed, about Jews who not only were not ashamed of their origin, but also did not consider themselves ‘little brothers,’ did not want to please the ‘big brother,’ tell him stupid jokes and share cooking recipes,” Portnikov wrote.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Kanovich was a recipient of the Israel Writers Union Prize and the Commander’s Cross of the Order of the Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas — one of Lithuania’s highest honors — and was named the Laureate of the Prize of the Government of Lithuania in the field of culture and art. He is survived by his two sons and wife Olga.
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Suspect at Large in Brown University Shooting that Killed at Least Two, Injured Eight
Police vehicles stand near the site of a mass shooting reported by authorities at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S., December 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Taylor Coester
Police in Rhode Island were searching for a suspect in a shooting at Brown University in Providence in which two people died and eight were critically wounded at the Ivy League school, officials said.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley told a news conference that police were still searching for the shooter, who struck at Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering building, where exams were taking place at the time. Officials said police were looking for a male dressed in black and were scouring local video cameras in the area for footage to get a better description of the suspect.
Smiley said officials could not yet disclose details about the victims, including whether they were students. He lamented the shooting.
“We are a week and a half away from Christmas. And two people died today and another eight are in the hospital,” he said. “So please pray for those families.”
Brown is on College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island‘s state capital. The university has hundreds of buildings, including lecture halls, laboratories and dormitories.
President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that he had been briefed on the situation, which he called “terrible.”
“All we can do right now is pray for the victims and for those that were very badly hurt.”
Compared to many countries, mass shootings in schools, workplaces, and places of worship are more common in the US, which has some of the most permissive gun laws in the developed world. The Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as any incident in which four or more victims have been shot, has counted 389 of them this year in the US.
Last year the US had more than 500 mass shootings, according to the archive.
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Rights Groups Condemn Re-Arrest of Nobel Laureate Mohammadi in Iran
Taghi Ramahi, husband of Narges Mohammadi, a jailed Iranian women’s rights advocate, who won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, poses with an undated photo of himself and his wife, during an interview at his home in Paris, France, October 6, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Christian Hartmann
International human rights groups have condemned the re-arrest of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi in Iran, with the Nobel committee calling on Iranian authorities to immediately clarify her whereabouts.
Mohammadi’s French lawyer, Chirine Ardakani, said on X that the human rights activist was arrested on Friday after denouncing the suspicious death of lawyer Khosrow Alikordi at his memorial ceremony in the northeastern city of Mashhad.
Mashhad prosecutor Hasan Hematifar told reporters on Saturday that Mohammadi was among 39 people arrested after the ceremony.
Hematifar said she and Alikordi’s brother had made provocative remarks at the event and encouraged those present “to chant ‘norm‑breaking’ slogans” and disturb the peace, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.
The prosecutor said Mashhad’s chief of police and another officer received knife wounds when trying to manage the scene.
CALLS FOR RELEASE
The Norwegian Nobel Committee called on Iranian authorities “to immediately clarify Mohammadi’s whereabouts, ensure her safety and integrity, and to release her without conditions.”
The European Union also called for Mohammadi’s release. “The EU urges Iranian authorities to release Ms Mohammadi, taking also into account her fragile health condition, as well as all those unjustly arrested in the exercise of their freedom of expression,” an EU spokesperson said on Saturday.
A video purportedly showing Mohammadi, 53, without the mandatory veil, standing on a car with a microphone and chanting “Long Live Iran” in front of a crowd, has gone viral on social media.
Ardakani said Mohammadi was beaten before her arrest.
Reporters Without Borders said four journalists and other participants were also arrested at the memorial for human rights lawyer Alikordi, who was found dead in his office on December 5.
Authorities gave the cause of his death as a heart attack, but rights groups have called for an investigation into his death.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said the crowd also chanted “death to the dictator,” a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as: “We fight, we die, we accept no humiliation.”
Mohammadi, who received the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, has spent more than 10 years of her life in prison, most recently from November 2021 when she was charged with “propaganda against the state,” “acting against national security,” and membership of “illegal organizations.”
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, said on Saturday that the opposition’s campaign in Venezuela was akin to that taking place in Iran.
“In Oslo this week, the world honored the power of conscience. I said to the ‘citizens of the world’ that our struggle is a long march toward freedom. That march is not Venezuelan alone. It is Iranian, it is universal,” she said on X on Saturday.
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Pete Hegseth Pledges Retribution After Islamist Gunmen in Syria Kills 2 US Soldiers and Civilian, Injuring 3
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on US President Donald Trump’s budget request for the Department of Defense, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, June 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
i24 News – Two US Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in an Islamic State attack on Saturday in Palmyra, Syria, where they were supporting counterterrorism operations, the Pentagon said.
Three others were wounded, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the attacker was killed by partner forces.
The Syrian Interior Ministry said that shooter in the deadly attack in Palmyra was a “member of the Syrian security forces who was influence by extremist ideology.”
President Donald Trump posted that “We mourn the loss of three Great American Patriots in Syria, two soldiers, and one Civilian Interpreter. Likewise, we pray for the three injured soldiers who, it has just been confirmed, are doing well.”
“This was an ISIS attack against the US, and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them. The President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is extremely angry and disturbed by this attack. There will be very serious retaliation. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”