She began writing novels in 1956 and achieved fame with her trilogy Shaul ve-Yohannah (Saul and Joanna), a three-generational tale of an assimilated German-Jewish family in prewar Germany.

In the 1980s Frankel abandoned her leftist convictions and adopted right-wing ideology, settling in the West Bank,[2] where she died in 2009, aged 91.

[5] Her father died in 1932 and she was taken under the care of a guardian, who helped her escape Nazi Germany with other Jewish children who were evacuated by the community and sent to British-administered Mandatory Palestine in 1933.

[2] She attended an agricultural school for girls and went on to study Jewish history and Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

[3][4] She achieved fame with the publication of her first novel, Shaul ve-Yohannah (Saul and Joanna), the first part of a trilogy published between 1956 and 1967.

[5] The trilogy is a fictionalized account of three generations of an assimilated German-Jewish family whose granddaughter joins a Zionist youth movement.

[2] She began observing the Jewish Sabbath and kosher dietary laws, and in 1982 moved with her second husband to the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba.

After divorce, she married Yisrael Rosenzweig, her literature editor and a teacher from Kibbutz Beit Alfa, with whom she had one daughter.