Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff was born in 1917 in Cairo to parents who hailed from Iraq and Tunisia. Educated in French schools, she moved to the United States in 1940–41, where she studied, wrote, and published in English, winning the Atlantic Monthly award for best short story and the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship for her novel Jacob’s Ladder. Returning to Egypt in 1951, she witnessed the decline in Jewish fortunes that began with the Nasser regime and the Sinai Campaign of 1956. After spending some time in Paris, she settled in Israel. She first gained prominence there through Aharon …