EPHRAIM KISHON was one of the most popular satirists of his age, selling more than 40 million books in his half-century of writing.

Kishon was born Ferenc Hoffmann in Budapest in 1924, the son of an assimilated middle-class Jewish family. Forbidden admission to university under the Nazi-influenced racial laws of Hungary’s Horty regime, he began an apprenticeship as a goldsmith.

In 1944 he was interned in a forced-labour camp, the first of several from which he was eventually saved by daring and by luck. His excellent chess playing kept him alive in one camp whose commandant needed a skilled opponent; in another he was spared execution by a sadistic guard who shot everyone else around him. “He made a mistake letting a satirist live,” Kishon would later remark.

He finally escaped during transportation to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, and survived the remainder of the war in disguise as “Stanko Andras”, a Slovakian labourer. In 1945 he returned to Hungary, where he began to study art history and sculpture, but he disliked the new Communist regime, and in May 1949 set sail for the new state of Israel.

“Born in Budapest, reborn in Israel,” Kishon said of himself. Arriving in Haifa aboard a refugee ship, he identified himself as Ferenc Kishont — with a new, Israeli-sounding name rather than his native Hoffman. Through a typing error by an immigration official, the 25-year-old Kishont was registered without a final T and his Hungarian name of Ferenc disappeared altogether. “There’s no such name,” said the same official, arbitrarily assigning him the Hebrew name of Ephraim.

Kishon spent his first years in Israel on the Kfar Hachores kibbutz near Nazareth, working as an electrician, farmhand and latrine-cleaner. He also found work writing for the Hungarian-language Zionist newspaper Uj Kelet (New Middle East), and after only two years had sufficient mastered Hebrew to begin writing for the new national newspaper Maariv (Evening), under the pseudonym Ghad Gadja (Little Lamb). For some 30 years Kishon contributed a daily column to Maariv, which remained a steady voice of conservatism within a predominantly liberal Israeli press.

Kishon made his literary breakthrough in the 1950s with The Blaumilch Canal, the satirical tale of a lunatic who breaks out of his asylum to drill a giant hole through the middle of Tel Aviv. The book, written in Hebrew, brought him instant popularity in Israel, and he followed it with a 50-year series of novels in similar vein, a wryly humorous retelling of everyday life in his new homeland. His affectionate stories of his own family life, published in English as My Family Right or Wrong, is the most widely sold Hebrew book in the world after the Bible.

Kishon’s output of some 50 books has been translated into 37 languages, with worldwide sales of 43 million copies, the majority (32 million) in German. “It gives me great satisfaction to see the grandchildren of my executioners queueing up to buy my books,” he said.

But he rejected the idea of collective guilt for the Holocaust, and maintained many friendships in Germany. Christina Weiss, the German Culture Minister, described Kishon as “a catalyst for development in the best sense. He helped a lot of Germans to confront and overcome their anti-Semitism,” she said.

Besides his books, Kishon wrote plays and film scripts, directing the latter himself, and earning three Golden Globes and two Oscar nominations. In March 2002 he was awarded the Israel Prize, the country’s most prestigious award. He responded with a mixture of pride and irony. “I’ve won the Israel Prize,” he declared, “even though I’m pro-Israel. It’s almost like a state pardon. They usually give it to one of those liberals who love the Palestinians and hate the settlers.”

In recent years, Kishon’s fervent Zionism had made him increasingly unfashionable among Israel’s left- leaning intellectuals, and he lost no opportunity to attack the “smart arses who sit around in cafés turning the most patriotic young people in the world into self-hating Jews”.

It was Kishon’s bitterness towards Israel’s literary establishment, who viewed his bestselling “middle-brow” works with some disdain, which prompted his decision in 1981 to make a second home in the rural Swiss canton of Appenzell. From Switzerland, he continued to voice his Zionism (“though I’m in favour of a Palestinian state”) and an increasingly strident conservatism. He became an active polemicist against modern art and gave his public support to the American-led invasion of Iraq.

Kishon gave his last newspaper interview the evening before his death, to comment on the address which Horst Köhler, the President of Germany, was to give to the Knesset — a walkout by members had been feared if Köhler addressed the Israeli parliamentarians in German.

“I advise Herr Köhler to begin with a few words in Hebrew,” said Kishon. “Then he should apologise for speaking in German. It’s his own language, but it’s the language that accompanied the most bestial behaviour towards the Jews.” As to the threatened walkout, Kishon added: “There’s no need to insult a good man.”

Although he died in Switzerland, Kishon was buried in the artists’ cemetery in Tel Aviv. He is survived by his third wife, Lisa Witasek, and three children.

Ephraim Kishon, Israeli satirist, was born on August 23, 1924. He died on January 29, 2005, aged 80.