Yehuda Amichai | |
|---|---|
| File:Yehuda amichai.jpg | |
| Born | 3 May 1924 |
| Died | 22 September 2000 (aged 76) |
Yehuda Amichai (born Ludwig Pfeuffer; Hebrew: יהודה עמיחי; May 3, 1924 – September 22, 2000) was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet.[1] He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew.[2]
Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.[3]
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 12 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936.[4] He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defence force of the Jewish community in pre-state Israel. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a member of the British Army Jewish Brigade, and in the Negev on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.[4]
After the War of Independence, Amichai studied Bible 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.[5] Later, he was poet in residence at numerous universities, including Berkeley, NYU, and Yale.[6]
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War.[7] He later became an advocate of peace and reconciliation in the region, working with Arab writers. He was married twice, first 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.[8]
He died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.
Amichai's poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and also 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.[9]
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."[10]
Amichai 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 was invited by Karlo Menoti to read poetry in the fesival of Spoleto with Octavio Pass, Allan Ginsburg, Ezra Pound, W.H.Auden,Pablo Neruda and others. . In 1968 he was invited to read in The London Poetry Festival . His first translated book into English Selected Poems (1968) was translated by Assia Wevill (née Guttman), (Hughes' lover and mother to his daughter Shura).[11] 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...perhaps only as the Russians loved their poets in the early part of the last century. It is not hard to see why. Amichai's poems are easy on the surface and yet profound: humorous, ironic and yet full of passion, secular but God-engaged, allusive but accessible, charged with metaphor and yet remarkably concrete. Most of all, they are, like the speaking persona in his Letter of Recommendation, full of love: Oh, touch me, touch me, you good woman! / This is not a scar you feel under my shirt. / It is a letter of recommendation, folded, / from my father: / 'He is still a good boy and full of love.' "[12]
Amichai's friend and translator Ted Hughes wrote, in the Times Literary Supplement, "I've become more than ever convinced that Amichai is one of the biggest, most essential, most durable poeticvoices of this past century - one of the most intimate, alive and human, wise, humourous, true, loving, inwardly free and resourceful, at home in every human situation. One of the real treasures."
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer has said that he was directly inspired by seeing a reading by Amichai while Foer was a student at Princeton University, with the desire "to somehow move somebody" the way Amichai had moved him.[13] Foer's wife, author Nicole Krauss, has written that parts of her 2005 novel The History of Love were inspired by Amichai's poems.
Amichai's poetry has been translated into 40 languages.[6]
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 included in that book inspired his first thoughts about becoming a writer. Amichai began writing poetry in 1946, at age 22. He also changed his name to Yehuda Amichai around that same time. 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 Z.", who soon broke up with him and moved to the United States. Amichai said he started writing poetry in 1948 as a way of hiding this part of his life from the public record.[14]
Gold also believes that a childhood trauma in Germany had an impact on his later poetry: he had an argument with a childhood friend, Ruth Hanover, that caused her to bicycle home angrily; she fell and as a result had to get her leg amputated. Several years later, she was unable to join the rest of her family, who fled the Nazi takeover, due to her missing leg, and ended up being killed in the Holocaust. Amichai occasionally referred to her in his poems as "Little Ruth".[14]
Gold's main contention, not entirely convincing to some, is that Amichai felt he needed to cover up the depth of his involvement with his German childhood and his love of German literature in order to become a good Israeli citizen and a national poet. [15]
Amichai he 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 Distinguished Associate Fellow 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 a great number of international anthologies. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, but never won.[6] 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."[12]
Amichai left his archives to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.[6]