Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew 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.
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.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 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.
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War. Amichai published his first novel, , 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.
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. 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", 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", 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, 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".
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.
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 ... 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." "Almost every poem by Amichai is a statement about the general human condition and Amichai, in a certain sense, is always a philosophical poet."
He changed his name to Yehuda Amichai around 1946. In her biography of Amichai, 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. 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 names into Hebrew names... 'Amichai' was a right name, because it was Socialist, Zionist and optimistic."
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".
In an interview Amichai said: "Little Ruth is my Anne Frank". "I found out that she 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 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..." 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 his affair with an American woman.
Amichai wrote many plays and radio plays, a book of short stories, and a second novel.
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..."
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, was translated by Assia Guttman. 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."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."
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."
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.". And: "not only superb, but would, all by itself, have merited a Nobel Prize."
Author Nicole Krauss has said that she was affected by Amichai from a young age.
Amichai's poetry has been translated into 40 languages.
Mention in the Pope’s Address (2025)
In 2025, the poetry of Yehuda Amichai was quoted in Pope Leo XIV’s official Christmas address delivered at the Vatican. During the address, the Pope recited lines from one of Amichai’s poems without explicitly naming the poet, situating them within a universal message of compassion, humanity, and hope in the face of global suffering and war.The reference was widely reported in the international media, including coverage by CNN of the Christmas address,
The event was highlighted as further evidence of the international influence of Amichai’s poetry and its ability to transcend religious, cultural, and national boundaries decades after his death.
Awards and honours
- 1957 – Shlonsky Prize
- 1969 – Brenner Prize
- 1976 – Bialik Prize for literature
- 1981 – Würzburg's Prize for Culture
- 1982 – Israel Prize for Hebrew poetry. The prize citation reads, in part: "Through his synthesis of the poetic with the everyday, Yehuda Amichai effected a revolutionary change in both the subject matter and the language of poetry."
- 1986 – Agnon Prize
- 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair
- 1994 – Literary Lion Award
- 1995 – Macedonia's Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival
- 1996 – Norwegian Bjornson Poetry Award