Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai (יהודה עמיחי; 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.

Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of eleven to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936.

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 Mandate Palestine.

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.

As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a soldier in the British Army, and in the Negev on the southern front in the 1947–1949 Palestine war.

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.

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.

In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War.

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.

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.

Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963.

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 for 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.

Amichai died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.

Amichai's poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and with philosophical issues of the meaning of life and death.

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.

He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism.

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."

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.

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.

In an interview published in the American Poetry Review, Amichai spoke about his command of Hebrew: