Nathan Alterman

Nathan Alterman (נתן אלתרמן; August 14, 1910 – March 28, 1970) was an Israeli poet, playwright, journalist, and translator.

In 1925, when he was 15 years old, the family moved to Tel Aviv and he continued his studies at the Herzliya Hebrew High School.

When he was 19 years old, he travelled to Paris to study at the University of Paris (a.k.a. La Sorbonne), but a year later he decided to go to Nancy to study agronomy.

Though maintaining close contacts with his family and friends in Tel Aviv and visiting them on vacations, Alterman spent three years in France and was highly influenced by his occasional meetings with French artists and writers.

On his return to Tel Aviv in 1932, he started working at the Mikveh Yisrael agricultural school, but soon left it in favour of working as a journalist and poet.

In 1933, when Alterman was 33 years old, he joined the literary circle "Together" (יחדיו).

Members of that literary group published the literary magazine "Columns" (טורים) and rebelled against the literary establishment of that time, identified with the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and his followers.

In 1933, when he was 23 years old, Alterman began to write songs for the vaudeville theatre "The Broom" (המטאטא)."

On the 22nd of August, 1934, he married Rachel Marcus, an actress in "The Cameri Theatre" (התיאטרון הקאמרי)

In 1934, he began to publish in the daily newspaper Davar a rhymed column named "Tel Aviv Sketches" (סקיצות תל אביביות).

that addressed current affairs and during four months 26 of these rhymed columns were published.

In November 1934 he left Davar and began to publish in the daily newspaper Haaretz a similar column named "Moments" (רגעים) but this time the columns had a less lyrical and more satirical nature, and he continued to publish these columns for eight years during which he published a total of 297 columns.

Alterman's first published book of poetry was Kokhavim Bakhuts ("Stars Outside"), published in 1938.

This volume, with its "neo-romantic themes, highly charged texture, and metrical virtuosity," as Israeli critic Benjamin Harshav puts it, established him as a major force in modern Hebrew literature.

In January 1941 their only daughter was born: Tirtza Atar, who would grow up to become a poetess herself.

His next major book was "The Joy of the Poor" (שִׂמְחת עניים ṡimḥàt aniyím, 1941).

This is a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria consisting of 31 interconnected poems, all from the viewpoint of the ghost of a dead man obsessed with the living woman he loves – a reversal of the Orpheus and Eurydice story.

The dead man wants to protect his living love from war and poverty, but more than anything he wants to drag her into his world.

His plans are continually frustrated.

The light from a humble candle is enough to drive him back.

The story reads like a supernatural thriller, but the rhyme and the meters are regular and elegant.

In 1942, when the first news about the Holocaust reached the Zionist Jewish community in British Mandate Palestine, Alterman wrote a poem, which can be described as a sarcastic paraphrase on the Jewish prayer, "Praised are You ... who has chosen us out of all the nations".

In this poem Alterman says, "At our children's cry, shadowed by scaffolds, we heard not the world's furor. For you have chosen us out of all nations, you loved and favoured us. For you have chosen us of all nations, of Norwegians, Czechs and Britons. As they march toward scaffolds, Jewish children of reason, they know their blood shan't be reckoned among the rest, they just call to the mother 'turn away your face'."

In 1943, Alterman wrote the maqama "The Swedish Tongue", in which he praised Sweden's willingness to welcome Jewish refugees from Denmark.

In 1943, he also wrote a poem that was critical of Pope Pius XII, a poem that is featured at the Yad Vashem museum.

In 1945–1947, Alterman's weekly column in the Labour Movement "Davar" newspaper denounced the British army's oppressive measures and praising the illegal immigrant boats landing Jewish holocaust survivors on the country's shores, in defiance of British policy.

The most well-known of these is the 1945 "In Praise of an Italian Captain" (נאום תשובה לרב חובל איטלקי).

Having become a canonical text read on Israel's Remembrance Day, this poem was written in response to Chaim Weizmann's words in December 1947, after the adoption of the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, "No state is ever handed on a silver platter... The partition plan does not give the Jews but an opportunity".

In his poem, Alterman describes a scene similar to the Biblical Revelation on Mount Sinai, where the Jewish People are waiting to receive the Jewish state, as the Israelite were waiting to receive the Torah.

And yet, instead of Moses descending with the Tablets of Stone, the people see two unfamiliar youths, a boy and a girl, wounded and near dead with exhaustion.

When asked, "Who are you?"

they reply, "We are the silver platter on which the state of the Jews was handed to you".

He also wrote One from the GHL (GHL is a Hebrew acronym for overseas draft), which refers to the nearly 20,000 of Holocaust survivors and other Jewish refugees who immigrated to the newly created State of Israel and were immediately drafted into the Israel Defense Forces and sent to the front lines.

They had no military training and some 300 died in battle shortly after their immigration to Israel.

The poem was published in Davar on the last day of the war, in protest of the inhumane treatment of these soldiers.

The poem contrasts the sacrifice of these soldiers with the pretension of the state to be a safe homeland for Jewish refugees.

Though never holding any elected office, Alterman was highly influential in Socialist Zionist politics, both before and after the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948.

Nathan Alterman was born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire).

In the early stages of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War he wrote numerous patriotic poems, the most well-known of which is "The Silver Platter" (מגש הכסף magásh ha-késef).

Alterman is credited with bringing the seeds of the marmande tomato to Israel, where it was the main species cultivated in the country until the 1960s.