Felix Kandel

Feliks Solomonovich Kandel (Russian: Фéликс Соломóнович Кáндель; born 21 October 1932) is a Jewish writer, residing in Jerusalem, Israel.

He was born in 1932 in Moscow, Soviet Union to a Jewish family. In 1941 his mother and he were evacuated to Ural mountains, where they remained till 1944. In 1950 he was admitted to the Moscow Aeronautic Institute, and graduated with an engineering degree in 1955. During his studies he and a classmate started writing sketches and directing institute amateur performances. They quickly assembled a group of students around them, and continued to write for them after graduation.

Between 1955 and 1962 Kandel was designing missile engines for the Soviet military. At the same time he continued writing, under the pseudonym "Felix Kamov", mostly short stories and sketches for stand-up comedy.

In 1958 he married Tamara Abrina, also a graduate of the same institute. In 1959 their first child, Eugene, was born. Their younger son, Leonid Kandel, was born in 1967.

In 1963 Kandel quit his military job and became a professional freelance writer. He wrote plays, scripts for motion pictures, and published (with co-authors Eduard Uspensky, Grigory Gorin, and Arkady Arkanov) two books of short stories. His works were published by Literaturnaya Gazeta, Yunost', Novi Mir and other prestigious literary journals in Moscow. In 1965-66 he worked as an editor in the short documentaries almanac "Fitil'!", but then became a free-lance writer again.

In 1967, Felix Kamov, Arkadiy Khait, and Alexander Kurlandsky began writing scripts for the animated series Nu, pogodi!, directed by Vyacheslav Kotenochkin of the Soyuzmultfilm studio. From the very beginning, this became the most recognized animated series in the former Soviet Union, and later in the Eastern European countries. Today, it is hard to find a person in these countries, who would not recognize the wolf character from the series.

In the late 1960s Kandel started writing prose, which was never published in the Soviet Union, since it was not politically correct enough for the times. Following the Six-Day War of Israel in 1967, he became more interested in his Jewish roots, and in 1970 started studying Hebrew. By September 1973, Kandel's family had decided to emigrate to Israel, and applied for an emigration visa. The Soviet authorities refused to let them leave. In the following four years, Kandel was very active in the Jewish movement. He was one of the editors of the underground journal on Jewish culture, “Tarbut”, participated in numerous demonstrations, and prolonged hunger strikes, and was jailed for 15 days following one of those demonstrations. He continued writing prose, some of which was published in the West while he was still in the Soviet Union.

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