Shlomo Kalo

",[1] Aged 18, in 1946, he won a prize in a poetry competition and went to Prague, where he studied medicine at the Charles University, worked as a freelance journalist and wrote short stories.

For 26 years till his retirement (in 1988) he worked as director of the medical laboratories of Kupat Holim Klalit health services, in Rishon-leZion.

[5] Shlomo Kalo was married to Rivka Zohar-Kalo, a prominent Israeli singer, who performs and records, among others, songs he has written (music and lyrics).

During the 1970s he translated into Hebrew classical writings of Far-Eastern schools such as: Patanjeli's Yoga verses, The Bhagavadgita, Budha's Dhamapada, Tao-Te-Ching and others.

[8] Prof. Gershon Shaked (Hebrew University) maintains in his Modern Fiction study (Indiana University, 2000; p 102-3) that Kalo's book "The Heap" marked 'two turning points in Hebrew Literary History; the beginning of modernist fiction in Israel, and the advent of Sephardi and Ashkenazi authors who wrote about the immigrant Sephardic community'.

"The Heap," prof. Shaked continues, "has a special place in the history of Hebrew fiction because it is a neo-modernist social protest of an immigrant author".

Since that time, messages and solutions to a variety of issues have been both aired by national TV and radio channels, and widely covered by the press.

[9] During the Kosovo Crisis in 1999 Shlomo Kalo was the most prominent Israeli intellectual who publicly protested against US and NATO military attacks on Yugoslavia.

[10] Kalo's books have been translated into: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Greek, Malayalam, Bulgarian, Portuguese, Korean, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, and Romanian.