Yehuda Amichai (; born Ludwig Pfeuffer 3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew in modern times. His 17 books have been translated into more than 20 languages, including Chinese and Japanese. He was a people's poet who believed that his poetry should reflect ordinary life. As he once said, "I am also living among the dead." He changed his last name to "Amichai", meaning "My nation lives".
Amichai was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes, and was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Biography Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. His German name was Ludwig Pfeuffer.Love, War and History: Israel's Yehuda Amichai , All Things Considered, 22 April 2007
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of eleven to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936."Amichai, Yehuda", in Historical Dictionary of Israel. Eds. Bernard Reich and David H. Goldberg. 3rd ed. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. p. 37. Gallery of People, Biographies, Yehuda Amichai . Jewishagency.org (28 July 2008). He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a soldier in the British Army, serving in the Jewish Brigade. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War he served in the Israel Defense Forces on the southern front in the Negev.
After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin College of Education in Jerusalem, and became a teacher in Haifa. After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Amichai studied the Torah and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955.Yehuda Amichai papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library . Library.yale.edu.
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War.Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s national poet, dies at 76 . Jewishsf.com (29 September 2000). Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963. It is about a young Israeli who was born in Germany; after World War II, and the 1947–1949 Palestine war, he visits his hometown in Germany and recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi Yitneni Malon, about an Israeli poet living in New York, was published in 1971 while Amichai was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a poet in residence at New York University in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.
Amichai was invited in 1994 by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to read from his poems at the ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. "God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children" was one of the poems he read. This poem is inscribed on a wall in the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv. There are streets named after him in cities in Israel, and also one in Würzburg.
Amichai was married twice. He was first married to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, and then to Chana Sokolov; they had one son and one daughter. His two sons were Ron and David, and his daughter was Emmanuella.Poet of Israel's Soul, My Jewish Learning . Myjewishlearning.com.
Amichai died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.
Poetry Amichai's poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and with philosophical issues of the meaning of life and death. Amichai’s approach consistently prioritizes the living person over the dead symbol, and the human experience over the mythical.Amichai Chasson, Yehuda Amichai and the Jerusalem of the Middle, Jewish Review of Books, October 2024 His work is characterized by gentle irony and original, often surprising imagery. Like many secular Israeli poets, he struggles with religious faith. His poems are full of references to God and the religious experience."Does David still play before you?: Israeli poetry and the Bible", David C. Jacobson . Books.google.com. He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism.Chana Kronfeld, "The Wisdom of Camouflage" Prooftext 10' 1990 pp469-
Amichai has been credited with a "rare ability for transforming the personal, even private, love situation, with all its joys and agonies, into everybody's experience, making his own time and place general."Yehuda Amichai . Poetry Foundation.
Some of his imagery was accused of being sacrilegious. In his poem "And this is Your Glory" (Vehi Tehilatekha), for example, God is sprawled under the globe like a mechanic under a car, futilely trying to repair it. In the poem "Gods Change, Prayers Stay the Same" (Elim Mithalfim, ha-Tfillot Nisharot la-Ad), God is a portrayed as a tour guide or magician.
Many of Amichai's poems were set to music in Israel and in other countries. Among them: the poem Memorial Day for the War Dead was set to music for solo voices, chorus and orchestra in Mohammed Fairouz's Third Symphony.Moore, Thomas (12 September 2010), Mohammed Fairouz: An Interview , Opera Today. Retrieved 19 April 2011 Other poems were set by the composers Elizabeth Alexander ("Even a fist was once an open palm and fingers"), David Froom, Matthias Pintscher, Jan Dušek, Benjamin Wallfisch, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, Maya Beiser, Elizabeth Swados, Daniel Asia and others.
Language and poetic style In an interview published in the American Poetry Review, Amichai spoke about his command of Hebrew:
I grew up in a very religious household ... So the prayers, the language of prayer itself became a kind of natural language for me ... I don't try—like sometimes poets do—to 'enrich' poetry by getting more cultural material or more ethnic material into it. It comes very naturally.
Robert Alter describes Amichai's poetry as a "play of sound". He "builds a strong momentum that moves in free association from word to word, the sounds virtually generating the words that follow in the syntactic chain through phonetic kinship".Alter, Robert (31 December 2008). "Only a Man" The New Republic.
Amichai's work was popular in English translation, but admirers of his poetry in the original Hebrew claim his innovative use of the language is lost in translation. Subtle layers of meaning achieved using an ancient word rather than its modern synonym to impart a biblical connotation cannot always be conveyed. In Amichai's love poem In the Middle of This Century, for instance, the English translation reads: "the linsey-woolsey of our being together". The Hebrew term, shaatnez, refers to the biblical taboo on interweaving linen and wool, which a Hebrew reader would grasp as an image of forbidden union.Yehuda Amichai biography . Answers.com.
Literary work Amichai traced his beginnings as a poetry lover to when he was stationed with the British army in Egypt. There he happened to find an anthology of modern British poetry, and the works of Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. That book inspired his first thoughts about becoming a writer.
Literary scholar Boaz Arpaly wrote about the influence of biography on Amichai's poetry: "Literary criticism made the determination long ago that despite the autobiographical character of Amichai's poetry, the individual depicted in it is the typical Israeli everyman, and even in a wider sense, the individual as an individual of the twentieth century (a poetics that interweaves the private with the typically generic) ... Amichai routinely conflates biographical details from different times into one poetic framework, and exploits drafts and poetic ideas that were recorded in different periods, for a poem that would be written years later."Boaz Arpaly, "Yehuda Amichai- The Making of Israel's National Poet," Shofar, winter 2010 vol.28 No.2 "Almost every poem by Amichai is a statement about the general human condition and Amichai, in a certain sense, is always a philosophical poet."Boaz Arpali: "The Flowers and the Urn" Amichai's Poetry – Structure, Meaning, Poetics, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986
He changed his name to Yehuda Amichai ("my people lives") around 1946. In her biography of Amichai,. Upne.com. literary critic Nili Scharf Gold writes that the idea for the name change, as well as the name "Amichai", came from his girlfriend, Ruth Herrmann, who later moved to the United States and married Eric Zielenziger.Feinstein, Elaine Nili Scharf Gold: "Yehuda Amichai, The Making of Israel’s National Poet' . Jewish Quarterly. Contrary to Gold's claim, Amichai said in an interview that it was his idea to choose the name Amichai: "it was common at that time to change (foreign) names into Hebrew names ... 'Amichai' was a right name, because it was Socialist, Zionist and optimistic."Dan Omer: In This Burning Country, An Interview with Amichai, Proza 1978
Gold wrote that a childhood trauma in Germany affected Amichai's later poetry. She claims in her book that Amichai had an argument with a childhood friend, Ruth Hanover, which led to her cycling home angrily. Ruth was caught in a traffic accident, as a result of which she had to have a leg amputated, and Gold claims that Amichai felt guilt and responsibility. Ruth later was murdered in the Holocaust. Amichai occasionally referred to her in his poems as "Little Ruth".Amichai Yehuda, Working Journal, 11.12. 1990, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Gen.Mss 572/
In an interview Amichai said: "Little Ruth is my Anne Frank". "I found out that she (Little Ruth) was in the last transport in 1944. This knowledge goes with me all the time, not because of guilt." "If there is any guilty feeling it's like the guilt that soldiers feel when they survive the battle while their friends were killed."
Robert Alter wrote about Gold's contention: "Again and again Gold asks why Amichai did not represent his German childhood in his poetry, except fragmentarily and obliquely. The inconvenient fact that his major novel, Not of This time, Not of This Place, devotes elaborate attention to Würzburg (which is given the fictional name Weinburg) is not allowed to trouble Gold's thesis of suppression, because the book is fiction, not poetry, and hence is thought somehow to belong to a different category in regard to the writer's relation to his early years. But Gold's notion of Amichai's 'poetics of camouflage' rests on an entirely unexamined assumptionthat it is the task of the poet to represent his life directly and in full ..."Alter, Robert (31 December 2008), "Only A Man The New Republic". However, contrary to Alter's claims, Gold argued that Amichai only wrote extensively about Würzburg in his novel because it was not his primary genre and therefore would be read by fewer people. Moreover, Not of This Time, Not of This Place does not hide the fact that it is based on Amichai's autobiography, including both his trip to his former hometown (and, explicitly, his search for closure about Little Ruth) and his affair with an American woman.
Amichai wrote many plays and radio plays,Yehuda Amichai, Bels and Trains, Shcken Israel, 1992 a book of short stories,Yehuda Amichai, The World Is a Room and Other Stories. JPS 1984 and a second novel.Yehuda, Amichai. Hotel in the Wilderness. Shocken,1971
Boaz Arpaly wrote: "Amichai did not hide in his poetry the fact that he was an immigrant and a son of immigrants, but he chose to tell the story of his childhood in his hometown, in his novel Not of This Time, Not of This Place, and like any other writer, he decided which material of his life will become material to his poetry..."