Zvi Kolitz (c. 1912 – September 29, 2002), a film and theatrical producer and a writer whose short story Yosl Rakover Talks to God became a classic of Holocaust literature, died in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in Manhattan.
While living in Israel in the early 1950s, Mr. Kolitz was a co-writer and co-producer of Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1954), an Israeli war of independence movie, which was Israel's first full-length motion picture. He later moved to the United States and was co-producer of Rolf Hochhuth's Deputy, one of the first plays to challenge the Vatican's silence during the Holocaust, which ran on Broadway, amid considerable controversy, for nine months in 1964.
Kolitz was co-producer of several other Broadway shows, including The Megilla of Itzik Manger (1968), and a musical, I'm Solomon, an expensive flop that ran for seven performances in 1968.
But he was best known for Yosl Rakover Talks to God, a story he wrote in 1946 for a Jewish newspaper in Buenos Aires. In the story, set in the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto, a pious Jew challenges God. And so, my God, before I die, freed from all fear, beyond all terror, in a state of absolute inner peace and trust, I will allow myself to call you to account one last time in my life, the fictionalized Rakover says.
I believe in the God of Israel, even when he has done everything to make me cease to believe in him, he says at another point.
A few years after it was published, the story was translated into English and Hebrew but without Mr. Kolitz's name as the author. It was passed on as an authentic testimony of the Warsaw Ghetto and ended up in several Holocaust anthologies and even as a meditation in Jewish prayer books.
It was many years before Mr. Kolitz was able to recapture his story and claim it as his own. It was later translated under his name in editions in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish and Swedish. In 1999, Pantheon published the story in a slim volume with afterwords by Paul Badde, Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Wieseltier. Dr. Levinas called it a text both beautiful and true, true as only fiction can be.
Zvi Kolitz, the son of a prominent rabbinical family, was born in Alyta, Lithuania. He studied at the nearby Yeshiva of Slobodka and then lived for several years in Italy, where he attended the University of Florence and the Naval Academy at Civitavecchia.
He emigrated to Palestine before the Israeli war of independence and led recruiting efforts for the Zionist Revisionist movement. He was arrested by the British and jailed for his political activities. After Israel's independence in 1948, Mr. Kolitz became active in the state's literary and cultural life.
Mr. Kolitz also wrote several works of fiction and Jewish philosophy, including The Tiger Beneath the Skin: Stories and Parables of the Years of Death (Creative Age Press, 1947), Survival for What? (The Philosophical Library, 1969), The Teacher: An Existential Approach to the Bible (Jason Aronson, 1982) and Confrontation: The Existential Thought of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik (Ktav, 1993).
Until a few weeks before his death, Mr. Kolitz wrote a weekly column for the Yiddish newspaper Algemeiner Journal. The column appeared under his name for 32 years. He also taught courses in Jewish thought for many years at Yeshiva University.
On September 29, 2002, Zvi Kolitz died of natural causes in Manhattan. He was 90 years old. Mr. Kolitz is survived by his wife of 50 years, Mathilde; a son, Dr. Jonathan Kolitz of Roslyn Heights, N.Y.; two daughters, Daliah Shiloni of Kfar Saba, Israel, and Elinoar Rozen of Avichail, Israel; a brother, Rabbi Yitzhak Kolitz, and a sister, Rachel Margalioth, both of Jerusalem; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.