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Yehuda Amichai (; born Ludwig Pfeuffer 3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israelis poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew language in modern times. Yehuda Amichai, the poet of everyday life, love, and death, is the most internationally renowned Israeli poet. 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.
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).http://www.npr.org/transcripts/9699843 . Npr.org (22 April 2007). 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. 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.
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 Suez Crisis, 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. Religious metaphor and its denial in the poetry of Yehuda Amichai . Findarticles.com.
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.
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.
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 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..."
In the Times Literary Supplement, Ted Hughes wrote: "I've become more than ever convinced that Amichai is one of the biggest, most essential, most durable poetic voices of this past century – one of the most intimate, alive and human, wise, humorous, true, loving, inwardly free and resourceful, at home in every human situation. One of the real treasures." Times literary Supplement, 9 January 1998.
In The American Poetry Review, May–June 2016, David Biespiel wrote: "He translates the hardness of existence into new tenderness; tenderness into spiritual wonder that is meant to quiet outrage; and outrage into a mixture of worry and love and warmth ... He is one of the great joyful lamenters of all time, endlessly documenting his anguish, throbbing pains, mistaken dreams, shortages of faith, abundances of ecstatic loves, and humiliations. And, like everyone else, he wants everything both ways. In particular, he wants to be a lover and a loner, a guy in the street and an intellectual, believer and infidel, while insisting that all manifestations of war against the human spirit be mercilessly squashed." American Poetry Review, May–June 2016
Anthony Hecht said in 2000 that Open Closed Open "is as deeply spiritual a poem as any I have read in modern times, not excluding Eliot's Four Quartets, or anything to be found in the works of professional religionists. It is an incomparable triumph. Be immediately assured that this does not mean devoid of humor, or without a rich sense of comedy.". The New York Review of Books, 2 November 2000 And: "not only superb, but would, all by itself, have merited a Nobel Prize." Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013
Author Nicole Krauss has said that she was affected by Amichai from a young age.
Amichai's poetry has been translated into 40 languages.
Amichai received an Honor Citation from Assiut University, Egypt, and numerous honorary doctorates. He became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1986), and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991). His work is included in the "100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature" (2001), and in international anthologies Poems for the Millennium by J. Rothenberg and P. Joris, and 100 Great Poems of the 20th Century by Mark Strand. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, but never won. Tufts University English professor Jonathan Wilson wrote, "He should have won the Nobel Prize in any of the last 20 years, but he knew that as far as the Scandinavian judges were concerned, and whatever his personal politics, which were indubitably on the dovish side, he came from the wrong side of the stockade." The God of Small Things , Jonathan Wilson, The New York Times, 10 December 2000
Critical acclaim
Amichai's poetry in English appeared in the first issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, edited by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes in 1965. In 1966 he appeared at the Spoleto poetry festival with Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda and others. In 1968, he appeared at the London Poetry Festival. His first book in English, Selected Poems (1968), was translated by Assia Wevill (Hughes' lover and mother to his daughter Shura).Koren, Yehuda and Negev, Eilat A Lover of Unreason: the Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Robson Books, London 2006 Referring to him as "the great Israeli poet", Jonathan Wilson wrote in The New York Times that he is, "one of very few contemporary poets to have reached a broad cross-section without compromising his art. He was loved by his readers worldwide."
Awards and honours
Amichai Archive
Amichai sold his archive for over $200,000 to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. The archive contains 1,500 letters received from the early 1960s to the early 1990s from dozens of Israeli writers, poets, intellectuals and politicians. Overseas correspondence includes letters from Ted Hughes, Arthur Miller, Erica Jong, Paul Celan, and many others. The archive also includes dozens of unpublished poems, stories and plays; 50 notebooks and notepads with 1,500 pages of notes, poems, thoughts and drafts from the 1950s onward; and the poet's diaries, which he kept for 40 years. According to Moshe Mossek, former head of the Israel State Archive, these materials offer priceless data about Amichai's life and work.In the Hebrew edition of 19 October 2012, the Haaretz editorial board apologized for the incorrect facts that were published in Mosek's article.
Works in other languages
English
Nepali
Many of Amichai's poems have been translated into Nepali language by Suman Pokhrel, and some are collected in an anthology titled Manpareka Kehi Kavita. His poems included in this anthology are, " My Father" as " MERA BAA," " Forgetting Something" as " BIRSANU," " Do not Accept" as " SWEEKAR NAGARA," and " A Jewish Cemetery in Germany" as " JARMANIKO YAHUDI CHIHANGHRI" .
Burmese
A total of 37 poems of Yehuda Amichai have been translated into Burmese and published in Yangon, Myanmar in March 2018. Burmese poet and translator , Myo Tayzar Maung, translated and the book has been published by the Eras Publishing House.
Russian
See also
Further reading
A Reading in Yehuda Amichai's "Jewish Travel" and "Israeli Travel"
, Jewish Social Studies 11.3 (2005) 141-161
External links
Categories: 20th-century Israeli Poets, Modern Hebrew Writers, Jewish Israeli Novelists, Israeli Male Novelists, Jewish Israeli Poets, Israeli Male Poets, Hebrew-language Poets, Israel Prize In Hebrew Poetry Recipients, Brenner Prize Recipients, Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Laureates, New York University Faculty, Academic Staff Of The Hebrew University Of Jerusalem, Israeli Military Personnel Of The 1948 Arab–israeli War, Palmach Members, Israeli People Of The Yom Kippur War, People Of The Suez Crisis, Hebrew University Of Jerusalem Alumni, Jewish Emigrants From Nazi Germany To Mandatory Palestine, Writers From Würzburg, Writers From Jerusalem, Deaths From Cancer In Israel, 1924 Births, 2000 Deaths, Fellows Of The American Academy Of Arts And Sciences, The New Yorker People, 20th-century Israeli Novelists, Josephine Miles Literary Award Winners, Jewish Brigade Personnel, Immigrants Of The Fifth Aliyah, Recipients Of Prime Minister's Prize For Hebrew Literary Works, Bialik Prize Recipients
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