Bondy, Ruth
BONDY, RUTH
BONDY, RUTH (1923– ), journalist, translator, and writer. Bondy was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and survived three years in the Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. After returning to Czechoslovakia, she left for Israel in 1948, starting out as a teacher and then turning to journalism, mostly for the daily Davar, for which she wrote sketches, essays, and commentary. In 1980 she started producing translations from Czech into Hebrew, including Hašek's Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války ("The Good Soldier Schweik"), the novels of Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Ota Pavel, and Michal Viewegh; the essays of Václav Havel; Avigdor *Dagan's Hovory s Janem Masarykem ("Conversations with Jan Masaryk"); and the works of Jiří *Weil, Josef *Bor, Jan Otčenášek, Jan Werich, and Jan Jandourek. In 1996 she was awarded the Czech Ministry of Culture Prize.
Bondy also published several biographies – Ha-Shali'akh (1973; The Emissary, 1977), a life of the Italian Zionist Enzo *Sereni; Edelstein neged ha-Zeman (1981; Elder of the Jews – Jakob Edelstein of Theresienstadt, 1989); and Pinḥas Rosen u-Zemano ("Pinḥas Rosen and His Time," 1991), a biography of Israel's first minister of justice. Her autobiography, Shevarim Sheleimim ("Whole Broken Pieces"), apeared in 1997 and in 2003 she published in Czech Mezi námi řečeno ("Between Us"), an entertaining survey of the languages used by the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia. In the same year she was awarded the Gratias agit prize by the Czech minister of foreign affairs.
[Milos Pojar (2nd ed.)]