Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai (Hebrew: 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.[1]
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[edit]
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.[2]
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of eleven to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936.[3][4][5] 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.[4]
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.[6]
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War.[7] 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.[1] For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.[8]
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.[9]
Amichai died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.[10]
Poetry[edit]
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.[11] He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism.[12]
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."[13]
Some of his imagery was accused of being sacrilegious.[14] 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.[8]
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.[15]
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.
Critical acclaim[edit]
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 Guttman (Hughes' lover and mother to his daughter Shura).[29] 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."[30]
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."[31]
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."[32]
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.".[33] And: "not only superb, but would, all by itself, have merited a Nobel Prize."[34]
Author Nicole Krauss has said that she was affected by Amichai from a young age.[35]
Amichai's poetry has been translated into 40 languages.[36]
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).[41] 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.[36] 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."[30]
Amichai Archive[edit]
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.[42][43]
A Reading in Yehuda Amichai's "Jewish Travel" and "Israeli Travel" , Jewish Social Studies 11.3 (2005) 141-161