Ephraim Kishon was an Israeli author, dramatist, screenwriter, and Oscar-nominated film director. He was one of the most widely read contemporary satirists in the world.
Ephraim Kishon was born on August 23, 1924 by the name of Ferenc Hoffmann into a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. In his youth he did not know Hebrew nor Yiddish. His father worked as a bank manager and his mother was a former secretary. Kishon also had a sister who was a writer.
During World War II the Nazis imprisoned him in several concentration camps.
After the war when he returned to Budapest. In 1949 he immigrated to the newly founded state of Israel, together with his first wife Eva (Chawa) Klamer, to escape the Communist regime. In 1981, Kishon established a second home in the rural Swiss canton of Appenzell after feeling unappreciated in Israel, but remained a staunch Zionist.