One of the most prominent living Jewish writers and winner of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts for 2014, Grigory Kanovich was born into a traditional Jewish family in the Lithuanian town of Jonava in 1929.According to Mikhail Krutikov, Professor of Slavic and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan ". . . Today, Kanovich is the only writer in the entire world capable of depicting the life of the pre-war Jewish shtetl with the documentary precision of an immediate witness and the deep emotional passion of a lover mourning his loss. He survived the Holocaust almost by a miracle, and made it his mission to serve, against all odds, as a custodian of the collective memory of generations of Litvaks, Lithuanian Jews."Kanovich's novels, translated into 13 languages, with over 1.5 million copies sold, form an epic Litvak Saga - a memorial and a requiem to a community now vanished. His play "Smile at us, oh Lord", based on two of his novels, was presented to sold out audiences in the USA, Canada, Europe and Israel. Since 1993, the writer, who is a member of PEN Club, has lived in Israel.
