Hannah Yakin

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Hannah Yakin is an Israeli artist. She was born in Amsterdam in 1933 as Hannah van Hulst. During World War II, when she couldn't go to school and no paper was available, she used to erase what was written in old copybooks to compose and illustrate poems and stories, or to invent plays for the family to act. After sundown she would sit on the stairs and improvise on a violin while her sisters danced in the dark. Strange as it may appear, these were happy times in which necessity bore creativity.

After the war she went to high school and studied art in Utrecht and in Paris with Paul Colin. In 1956 she emigrated to Israel where she met and married the artist Abraham Yakin. During the first years of her marriage she concentrated chiefly on the themes of pregnancy, birth-giving and motherhood. After 1965 she created two large series of etchings, one about evolution, the other about music and musicians. In 1978 she took up writing, this time in English. Some of her short stories were published in American and Canadian literary magazines. A number of her stories were recently broadcast by the BBC World Service. She has published three illustrated books in small editions, as collectors' items.